Re-reading Neuromancer

I’ve been re-reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer this week, reliving the effect that it had on me twenty-odd years ago.

There was a chap at my school who had a cool older sister with an even cooler American boyfriend. This boyfriend had all but smuggled this book out of Canada. Or so the story went. Hadn’t even been published in the UK. Was hot.

It wasn’t the same shape as British paperbacks and the typeface was really small. All the spelling was American. By the time I was reading it, it was falling apart – I guess it had been passed around lots of kids before me. I read it in one afternoon and one evening and it has had a huge effect on me.

I remember thinking that there was no way anyone in my parents’ generation could even understand a half of one page of this book. It was something that only we could have access to. I was hugely disappointed when I found out that Gibson was about the same age as my Dad.

So, I’m reading it again – it’s still excellent.

It starts: “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” How odd, I’m thinking now, that with all the amazing predictive power that Gibson has, the first line is so analogue and dated. I’m pretty sure that my son will grow up without ever having seen what static on a TV screen looks like.

But, when I was 14 and reading it for the first time, the world he described seemed so, so far away and still does.