I agree with this, but it also understates Gibson's writing ability. There is a lot of science and tech in Neuromancer that it seems like he just mentions offhand, as part of the world-building, but a lot of those casual mentions involved a decent amount of underlying research. My favorite example is the casual reference to "annealing" algorithms in Neuromancer. Everyone has heard of simulated annealing these days, but the actual math paper that introduced the concept was only published in Science in 1983. Given the publication date of Neuromancer, he would have had to have picked up that reference directly from that Science article. Apparently he also used to wander around the UBC campus and sit in random science talks, just as a kind of sponge activity for background material. It shows through in the book, even though it never, ever stands out or calls attention to itself.
OntLawyer t1_iya0k72 wrote
Reply to comment by SpecificAstronaut69 in Neuromancer isn’t as hard as I’ve heard… by mikeyboi2567
I agree with this, but it also understates Gibson's writing ability. There is a lot of science and tech in Neuromancer that it seems like he just mentions offhand, as part of the world-building, but a lot of those casual mentions involved a decent amount of underlying research. My favorite example is the casual reference to "annealing" algorithms in Neuromancer. Everyone has heard of simulated annealing these days, but the actual math paper that introduced the concept was only published in Science in 1983. Given the publication date of Neuromancer, he would have had to have picked up that reference directly from that Science article. Apparently he also used to wander around the UBC campus and sit in random science talks, just as a kind of sponge activity for background material. It shows through in the book, even though it never, ever stands out or calls attention to itself.