A Case of Misguided Futurism

As a short disclaimer: I read quite a bit Neuromancer while I was still pretty sick with the flu, so if I really badly misinterpreted some part of it, just go ahead and blame that.

One thing that’s unrelated to what I’m actually going to be talking about but I felt like mentioning is how much Molly in Neuromancer reminded me of Brawne Lamia from Hyperion. They both have the sort of let’s just get this done persona, both had lovers named Johnny who were killed by the bad guys, and they both signed up for adventures that they know close to nothing about.

Anyway onto the actual topic: the future depicted in Neuromancer is, in my opinion, incredibly unlikely. With the cleanliness of how we’ve designed computers to access the web it would seem like a very large step backwards to be forced to actually use a head jack and connect to a direct stream of data, that you would be expected to parse, even if it is presented to you in the form of a second universe like you see in Neuromancer. As it turns out writing is just incredibly good at condensing a lot of information into a small space and so in my opinion it won’t ever be going away.

I feel that a more likely technology to develop if we ever gain the ability to project images into people’s minds, would be effectively a phone screen that uses your brain as the interface instead of a phone. This has the added advantage that you don’t have to entirely leave real life in order to access the data that you would get from jacking in in Neuromancer.

Another thing that struck me as odd was how conditions in the coffins were so cramped. It seems that the ability to jack into the matrix and perform transactions there would encourage people to spread out to where there is more space. Obviously people like Case at the beginning of the book who can’t jack in would want to condense into cities but that is going to be quite rare, as people don’t even seem to know that the toxin, which took the ability away from him exists.