The First Line of Neuromancer

This short essay, ‘Future Realities: The First Line of Neuromancer,’ originally appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of The First Line.

William Gibson’s 1984 blockbuster Neuromancer forever changed the way science fiction was written – and the way, too, we look at our own future. Slick and seedy, hardboiled as any noir thriller yet rich with New Wave stylistic pyrotechnics, and packed with enough extrapolative speculation and real-world texture that the future it describes feels, not like the product of one man’s imagination, but more the inevitable revelations of a prophet. This legendary book has an opening line to match, one that points clearly at the themes and questions Gibson explores: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

The most striking part of that line is, of course, the use of television static to describe the natural world. That we can see with perfect, intuitive understanding exactly what this image depicts* with its juxtaposition, and that it feels at once completely natural and perhaps a bit startling to us, only reinforces that we ourselves are living in the world Gibson describes. His near future is a place where a suite of technologies — electronic, genetic, and informational — infuse and inform all human activity. It is our own world to the nth degree, the post-everything world that we already feel spinning out of control around us, one in which we are increasingly uncertain of what it is to be human.

As famous as Neuromancer’s opening line is, it is also famously misquoted, “above the port” tending to be omitted when people repeat the line from memory.  This is unfortunate as ‘port’ is a key component of the line. The port in question is Chiba City, the outlaw edge of Tokyo, where down on his luck hacker Case functions as a low-level cog in the black market machinery of the city’s criminal underworld. Gibson’s internationalist vision is laid out in these opening scenes, where the polyglot and culturally syncretic streets of Chiba City show us the future of our world in microcosm. Here is a place of startling contrasts and unexpected convergences, home to drug runners, data thieves, rogue geneticists, and players large and small in the pushing of humanity’s envelope of possibilities. Chiba City, a port open to all the world has to offer, is no mere melting pot, it is a blast furnace producing startling new alloys of experience. Once out of Japan, Gibson takes us on a tour spanning his near future, from the slummy conurbation of the Eastern USA, to a strange and familiar Istanbul, and into the new worlds of space itself, and always he presents us with an amalgam, formed by a planet grown so small its every border overlaps.

But ‘ports’ are also the name given to skull jacks with which people can interface directly with machines — and, as it turns out, machines can do the same with people. Case is one such ‘data cowboy’ a man addicted to the rush of direct mind contact with computers. It’s a spiritual craving on his part, a state of being preferable to dwelling within his drug-addicted, damaged physical shell. Here is where cyberspace gets its start – and it is in Neuromancer that the word first appears – but it is also a telling glimpse of virtual states of being in which technology, for the first time, can give us realms of existence beyond that of any drug, mania, or religious ecstasy. This brave new virtual world is also where the book presents its essential question: what is it to be human in the age of technology?

Organic or mechanical? Virtual or physical? Television or sky? From the first line Neuromancer reveals exactly what questions it will pose, and what themes it celebrates. But it is not just a television image that has replaced our sky, but a blank, dead channel, and the tone of pessimism that pervades the novel as Case and company travel throughout the dingy and cobbled together world of Neuromancer suggests there is a lie inherent in the liberating promise of technology. And it is this final, cynical signature to the opening line that sites the reader so firmly within the mind-space of William Gibson as he unfolds his bleak vision of humanity’s future.

*of course the solid bright blue screens of modern digital television ‘dead channels’ may undermine this metaphor for generations that have never grown up seeing TV static.