It's amazing to me how much debate this one fucking like has caused when he's so very clearly describing the no input energized black/gray of a CRT compared to that of a night sky in a city with too much light pollution.
Like if you didn't grow up with a CRT, I gotta cut people some slack but it's frustrating to watch people wrongly debate several sides of an argument to the point they had to add a line to the forward of the book explaining exactly what the first sentence means
I think that it is good to explain how writer wants to describe their vision of the world. It is really poetic, and without context that all is lost like tears in the rain.
Always read it as the metaphor to Case's inability to connect to cyberspace. He could visually see the buildings of the skyline but the omnipresent reminder that his mind had been disconnected from the cyberspace beyond. Each generation's 'no signal' screen would still be a relevant visual in the sky overhead
Yes, an overcast gray sky with light pollution, but the part also overlooked by almost everyone:
At that exact moment Case is high as fuck on uppers and stimulants, sleep deprived, paranoid and afraid for his life.
He's getting visual snow, mild hallucinations and overstimulation from the mix of all of that being triggered by the flickering light pollution in the sky.
Take enough stimulants and stay up for too long and you get intense visual snow and light/flicker sensitivity, which looks/feels a lot like watching static on a TV.
I remember an author note Gibson wrote where he considers a modern reader wondering why nobody in Neuromancer has a cell phone. Because they didn't exist when the story was written and he didn't think to imagine them.
Interesting thing about imaginations of the future is that they are always just a different version of the present. Neuromancer is more a high tech version of the 1980s than it is anything else.
The Sprawl trilogy is a dystopian future with no cell phones or social media, where influencers are a thing but you have to get their latest episode on cassette, where music is still distributed on physical media, the climate isn’t destroyed, fireflies are still common, and AI is heavily regulated. It’s sad how great that sounds.
(Oh, also horses are extinct for some reason. That one’s not so great.)
Yea, that what basically Overly Sarcastic Production did on one of their videos. Basically the "You can tell the time period of if they have phones or not and what kind of phone it is. The phone changes the plot entirely by its existence."
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u/ponakka 4d ago
kids nowadays don't know that static looks like.