Neuromancer
The first of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Neuromancer is the classic cyberpunk novel. The winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future — a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations. Henry Dorsett Case was the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction. Hotwired to the leading edges of art and technology, Neuromancer is a cyberpunk, science fiction masterpiece — a classic that ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.
Stats for nerds
296recommend
1,117mentions
780people
2007–2026years
32% recommend62% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Which books did you read at least twice? Please give author, title, and how often you have read it.
For me the (probably incomplete list) is:
Connie Willis: Doomsday Book (three times)
Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World (twice or three times)
Frank Herbert: Dune (three times)
Tolkien: Lord of the Rings (three times)
Stephen King: Salem's Lot, The Shining, It (three times each)
Stephen King & Peter Straub: The Talisman (twice)
Vernor Vinge: A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon The Deep, Rainbow's End (each twice)
Tracy Kidder: The Soul of a New Machine (twice)
Larry McMurtry: Lonesome Dove (twice)
Ross Thomas: Chinaman's Chance (twice)
William Gibson: Neuromancer, The Peripheral, Agency (each twice)
- I've lost count of the times I've read Neuromancer.
Kim Stanley Robinson's The Wild Shore is another repeat favourite.
- I can’t resist an invocation:)
Most of these are old since I’ve been reading more articles these days but here are a few good books or series I’ve read more than twice: The Hobbit, LOTR, the Silmarillion, Neuromancer, the Chronicles of Narnia, Hong Lou Meng, The Heart Sutra, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao De Ching, The Wheel of Time series, No country for old men, Persuasion, Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, The Way of Kings, The Talisman, the Dark Tower Series, and The Prophet.
- > Watching the biggest pirates I've known suddenly talk about "defending artists" and strengthening copyright is amusing, but it points to a bigger problem.
Millenial here, hello. Yes, we were the biggest pirates, because we had no means to buy the music we liked, period. CDs were kidney-money (if the album we liked available at all), digital distribution was non-existent and cassettes were sounding worse than first generation shellac records in some cases.
I personally bought most of the music I used to pirate. I buy the eBooks I like, and keep a backup copy for myself. Heck I even hounded a CD from a disbanded group for a couple of years and ordered it online because the music was good and they deserved another sale.
Because for us, piracy was about the service at first. We went to concerts, bought merch, etc. to support them.
Also this brings me to the second point: You miss the point entirely about datacenters & AI datacenters. Second, you miss the point between AI, the tech and the building of AI the tech.
First, datacenters are nothing new, and nobody is opposed to "normal" datacenters. The difference between a standard datacenter and AI datacenter is almost night and day (power density, compute load, hardware portfolio, etc.). I always talk about AI datacenters, because I work at a datacenter. I know how these things can be made more environmentally friendly, but no, everybody has to move fast and break things. In this case, we're mostly breaking down our planet, accelerating water stress and global warming related side effects while destroying livelihoods of communities as a whole.
Second is AI as a tech vs. how it's built as a tech. Heck, I'm not even opposed to copyrighted works used as training data, many of us want consent. Control over whether their works are used for training or not. Not compensation, not money, but consent. Not to be seen as slave of these AI providers to feed them.
For artists, compensation is their right. Have you ever composed music, or performed even? Do you know how much effort goes into doing this (hint: We used to rehearse for 10 hours/week for 14 weeks to give a 90 minute concert)? Watch this [0] if you want some insight how a single song is assembled over ideas, takes, tries with blood, sweat and tears. Same for writing. Did you read Hyperion Cantos, Lord of the Rings, Neuromancer, Zones of Thought, etc.? I mean, even the fact checking in Ready Player One could easily take a year. These books created worlds, changed minds and the authors of these books and others deserve some fair compensation for this.
You may find graphic design, art and photography mundane, but when you're not taking selfies and shooting stories or taking videos of a concert which you won't be able to enjoy because of the video-grabbing session for likes, these can be very powerful mediums for storytelling or getting your message across.
Not everyone is against AI as the tech. I am not. I have developed agent-based systems with emergent intelligence before people knew the term autonomous agent.
Yes, we need better laws to protect property rights in the space of ideas, but not to solely protect the jobs, but TO PROTECT THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMANS AND THEIR FREEDOM TO CREATE AND OWN THE THINGS THEY HAVE CREATED.
"You'll own nothing and be happy" is a drug to make masses comply, and unfortunately, you're apparently one of the flag carriers of that crowd.
This post is written with a real brain, approximately 10 fingers, at 1x by a physical human you can talk with.
- > Many of the people who used to parttake in the interesting discussuons I came here for, have gotten tired of 80% of the posts at any given time being about the brand new AGI LLM that's so much better than last week's AGI LLM, and have left months ago.
I hope you are wrong, or rather, that HN's userbase can keep renewing itself on cycles of new users without getting into an eternal september situation. It's none of my affair (and yes, lately HN AI threads read suspiciously airheaded in tone, like they fell out of /r/codex and Grok-heavy online circles) overall, but I'd be curious if dang or whoever can easily get an idea as to what the current population of HN weekly/daily active users are and if that bag of users is similar to a year over year or decade over decade cohort. X% of our users are more than 10 years old, and so on.
But the above is an idle thought experiment, back to your point, there's definitely some bandwagon work going on, astroturfing and bot-controlled no doubts there too, and if I find one more Rationalist / Effective Altruist / AI doomer cult post, I may find a way to ship them 10 virtual spam palettes because there's more to the web than 'AI-chatterbox-class who's never actually read Neuromancer or Snow Crash or the meatier works of Asimov act superior to the rest of us' strawmen I have confirmation bias running into, yet overall, I still find HN has that spark here and there.
> Alice: ABC-library stinks, why did they write it that way? > Bob Reply: Hi there, yak here, I wrote it because Dennis Ritchie was sick with a cold and we needed it for Los Alamos Labs.
Those gold moments keep me here still.
- I read that recently. Neuromancer I had read before and found excellent again (and in places pithier in the era of AI). It's very quotable too.
The other two were much weaker; of the two Count Zero was least interesting though so at least it wraps up on a fairly high note.
I read the Bridge trilogy a decade or so ago (?) and I must re-read that soon too - I suspect Idoru will hit harder these days.
