Johnny Mnemonic
Synopsis: Johnny is a courier. He carries data, uploaded into his brain through a jack implanted in his skull. And so Johnny's troubles begin. The data is stolen, and to get it back the owners have hired the Yakuza who intend to get hold of Johnny. But all they really need is his cryogenically frozen head. From the Back Cover: Johnny is a courier. He carries other people's memories, millions of them, downloaded into his brain... Working out of Beijing, he is hired to carry a package to the States. The hundreds of gigabytes stashed in his head are far beyond his capacity, but as long as he gets downloaded quickly they won't do him any permanent harm... But headaches are the least of Johnny's problems. The Americans aren't the only ones who want the data. The Yakuza are after Johnny too. Not all of him, though. All they need is his cryogenically frozen head... In 'JOHNNY MNEMONIC'the science-fiction guru of our age brings his acid-drenched tale of the near future to the screen for the first time. Containing William Gibson's original short story, his full script and exclusive stills from the film, this classic of the cyberpunk era expresses the unique vision of the author who was the first to see his way into tomorrow...
Stats for nerds
2recommend
18mentions
17people
2011–2026years
11% recommend83% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- William Gibson would be proud.
(Before anybody takes any offence on this, I really hope y'all read Johnny Mnemonic).
- The Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose.
The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul, Hofstadter and Dennet.
The Society of Mind, Minsky.
Martin Gardner. http://www.amazon.com/Martin-Gardner/e/B000AP8X8G/ref=sr_ntt...
Donald Knuth. http://www.amazon.com/Martin-Gardner/e/B000AP8X8G/ref=sr_ntt...
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, Knuth.
e: The Story of a Number, Maor.
The Pythagorean Theorem: a 4000-year history, Maor.
Flatland, Abbot.
Snowcrash, Stevenson.
Johnny Mnemonic, Gibson.
- Gibson is one of those writers who are much better prose stylists than plotters.
I enjoy reading his prose immensely, but he's been stamping out books with the same template for ever: an expert is hired to do something. Turns out there's a man with unlimited cash flow funding everything, but was hiding his true intentions (usually in order to lay a trap), which are revealed, and then some McGuffin is saved or eliminated or whatever; meanwhile, the main character mostly didn't do anything, just a passive spectator to some plot unfolding around them. The one I will forgive most easily here is Count Zero, which I think is much better than its reputation (except for the Haitian voodoo deity stuff, which didn't land for me); while the template is the same, the ruse connects well with Neuromancer, and it's just a fun, action-filled book that is definitely not boring. (The ruse in The Peripheral, by comparison, was deeply unsatisfying. Agency was junk, most of the book describing preparations for a military attack while the main character sleeps. Even the prose was much worse and much sloppier than usual.)
What's interesting is that his early short stories are much more original, I think. Burning Chrome, New Rose Hotel, and Johnny Mnemonic, for example, show flashes of originality that maybe Gibson wasn't able to keep up when plotting out whole novels.
- This post had me wracking my brain asking, "Did any of Gibson's books have someone get mugged for some hot RAM?"
Edit: Actually Johnny Mnemonic had 325MB in his head and he had the whole Yakuza out to kill him.
- Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
- Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?" stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers to the question are no better than a random man on the street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile => Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense like Johnny Mnemonic.
I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.
