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) artificial intelligence has become available, and his depiction of it is remarkable accurate over forty years later.

Many people predicted human-like chatbots, but Gibson also depicted human personalities surviving into a digital afterlife as “constructs.” This too has come true in our era. Writings and video are loaded into the same LLM architecture and reproduce the personalities of people who are dead. I find this unsettling and touched somewhat on the concept in my review of Neal Stephenson’s novel, Fall or, Dodge In Hell. But that novel was written much later and features different technology.

I also think Gibson, along with a handful of others, somewhat accurately predicted the cultural influences of advanced computer technology: the new subcultures, the fads, the ubiquity of gadgets and software, electronic currency and the obsolescence of paper money.

A few predictions have not yet come true but seem likely to: biological computing and the integration of technology with the human nervous system (currently in an early phase), fundamental redesign of the human body, DNA splicing for embryos, the general collapse of law and order. In Gibson’s cyberpunk novels, government is often absent or ineffective compared to non-governmental forces. That has yet to happen. Government seems more powerful now than ever.

I started reading science fiction in childhood, and many of the predicted futures found in the back catalog obviously will not happen. Gibson’s predictions hold up much better, and are still being verified. The amazing thing about Gibson is that he made the predictions so much in advance with so little information. Most of us could never do that.