The near future: electronic surveillance on citizens even in ‘free’ societies has reached incredible levels (‘four our protection’, of course). Computing technology and communications equipment have integrated to a level never seen before; the world is wired and humans (some on the cusp of posthumanism) swim in a digital sea, travel virtual words away from their meatspace reality of corporate-run, decaying cities. Yeah, it sounds almost a cliché now, a mix of bits of current reality extrapolated to a more extreme version for the purposes of fiction and drama. But actually this was the future William Gibson was writing about in the seminal novel Neuromancer.
(Tom de Haven and Bruce Jensen’s adaptation of Neuromancer for Epic Comics)
Hard to believe that this was back in 1984, when a lot of us would still be playing around with Commodore 64s and Spectrum 48K home computers, using tape decks to save and load data and here was Bill imagining what seemed a very odd new form of SF, what we would come to call Cyberpunk, where the whole world was digitally connected and many humans were jacked into it all. I was still six years from my first ever email account at that time and web surfing was even further away (no web!). Some of Bill’s more recent work, like Pattern Recognition, has seemed far less SF in tone and I suspect this might be partly to do with the fact that much of what he had written about as science fiction once has pretty much passed into fact now.
Captain Xerox at the Website at the End of the Universe has links to a site which has taken the long out-of-print graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning novel (it won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick awards, a very impressive haul) published by Epic Comics in the late 1980s. Tom de Haven and Bruce Jensen adapted Neuromancer for Epic, but the series only got as far as the first few chapters of the novel before it was cancelled, although some have said that Bill Gibson himself was quite happy with the way the comics adaptation was treating his work. The William Gibson aleph site has been busy collecting images from this deceased comics project and has put them online to read, restoring them to a sort of life, ironically in the cyberspace Bill once wrote about and most geeks then could only imagine as a distant technological future.
(Page 40 from Epic’s Neuromancer adaptation)
It is funny to look at this in 2007; it isn’t quite like, say, re-reading the Classic Dan Dare and thinking, ah, that was the way they used to think the future (now our past, of course) would look since rather more of Bill’s ideas actually did come to pass (and most of the Dan Dare ones didn’t, still a source of regret for this space cadet). But still some of it carries that “this is how the future used to look” feel which, like reading even older classic SF like The Space Merchants, amuses me on one level with how much it reflects a past society rather than the future (well, future to the writer, often now our real present or even a few years in the past to us) and at the same time gives me little shivers at how much the writer picked up on. Not a new literary trick, of course – Verne and Wells have been making us think similar thoughts for a century after all – but this cyberghost of a comic of Cyberpunk’s bible stirs up all sorts of strange thoughts in my head and an urge to re-read the original novel building inside me. There’s a virtual ghost in my machine whispering electronic thoughts to me; how very William Gibson…
(page 5 from the Epic graphic novel of Neuromancer)
March 9th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Thank you for finding this. I heard about it once on a message board, but that’s all I could ever find on it. I love me some William Gibson. I still think his vision of the future holds up in prose. Don’t know about the comic because I checked out the links yet. But William Gibson, I loves a lot.