William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published in 1984, 30 years ago. That means that we stand at almost exactly the same historical distance from it as it did to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which was published in 1953.
The book has aged pretty well, IMHO. But I always found it amusing the semi-famous opening line has almost totally reversed its meaning:
Gibson of course means grey and black, making the port seem ominous and dark. But anyone younger then 20 or so is only going to be familiar with TVs that turn a pleasant sky blue when they don’t have a signal.
Anyhoo, always amused me, since the unintended change in the mood set by the first sentence due to a quirk of technological progress seems vaguely Gibsonish.
And oddly enough both meanings fit the tone of the novel, flickering grey static or a cold and artificial blue.
Fascinating. And we are just at the beginning of the Internet Age, the age of the online collective. So much has changed in the second 30 years vs. period from 451 to NM…
William Gibson wrote in an introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of Neuromancer that the comparison between TV screens and the sky didn’t even make sense in 1984, let alone in 2004 when he wrote that introduction. He says that in writing that sentence he was thinking of the TV’s of his childhood in the late 1950’s, not of those when the book came out in 1984. The TV’s he was thinking of were black and white, and already by 1984 the static didn’t look like the image he had in mind as he wrote that sentence. He says further that lots of things don’t make sense from today’s perspective. Where are the cell phones, for instance? He notes that not only did he miss them, but he actually had one scene where the hero walks by a bank of pay phones, where each one rings as he passes it, this being the only way the A.I. knows to try to get hold of the hero.
Gibson also said he never saw a personal computer until after the book was published.
And he wrote the book on a manual typewriter.
Like in Person of Interest.
Oh cool!
I’ve actually just started ‘reading’ that book via an MP3 loan from my local library. I’m a few chapters in, pretty cool so far. And it included the 20th anniversary intro with the dead-channel static imagery, and the missing portable cell phones, and also Gibson talking about how he felt he had to keep the USSR intact after letting ‘the sprawl’ take over the USA. 
Don’t forget the infamous line about “His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn’t taking calls.”
Because three megabytes of RAM would be worth stealing in a world advanced enough to have direct mind/machine interfaces.
Remember that at the time 640K was thought to be more than you could ever hope to need.
It was supposed to be enough for anybody.
As a society we keenly lack both seedy Elite Hacker bars and Rastafarian Space Truckers. I did like Gibson’s view of the space program, though, it seemed both feasible and plausible, although by 1984 it was already clear that his vision belonged to the past. In hindsight, it looks like Arthur C. Clarke with corporate logos and gang graffiti.