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[personal profile] drwex
In the previous entry I asked if folk knew the origin of a quote, which began the novel Neuromancer.

The reason I posted it was that I was over at [livejournal.com profile] taura_g's place and she was having problems getting her PC to show proper images on her television. The result was just about that sort of gray (though less staticky) that Gibson was talking about and it prompted me to utter the line. She didn't recognize the quote I made so I wanted to see how many of my friends would get it.

Once upon a long ago I was extolling the imagery of that line to Bruce Sterling who replied that he though it was "crap." I asked why and he said it was crap because in the future people wouldn't watch television, things wouldn't have channels, and the people in the novel wouldn't make that sort of metaphor. It was an image uniquely of its time. In fact, Sterling asserted, people would read the novel in the future and have no idea what that color was, thus rendering it meaningless.

I was curious to see how many of my friends would know the line, and know what it refers to.

As [livejournal.com profile] dr_memory pointed out, and Bruce Sterling got me to believe, Neuromancer isn't really the right messenger for the meme that was cyberpunk. The short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is a far better representative, carrying as it does the distilled acidic essence of the idea that science fiction could be something so wrenchingly different. But far fewer people have read that story than have read Neuromancer and it was the novel and its imagery that captured the public imagination. Even if the opening line is crap.
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