The Prescience of William Gibson
My battered copy of Neuromancer . I've read it at least twice in print, not including the audiobook version I just listened to. I downloaded the audiobook of Neuromancer , William Gibson’s first novel, for a road trip last week. I first read the print version and was entertained. The receipt was still in the back of the book: purchased on September 2, 2001 in a Books-A-Million in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Every Gibson novel moves fast and has several passages where I break down into laughter for a full minute. I haven’t revisited the novel in perhaps fifteen years and I’m more amazed than ever at Gibson’s ability to predict the future, I presume, working from research gathered in the early 1980s by someone who is not a technologist. The novel, ironically, was composed on a mechanical typewriter, yet predicted the digital internet future, several years before the internet was accessible to the general public. Since the first time I read the novel, Large Language Model (LLM) artificia...
