Neuromancer Revisited

Neuromancer at 25: What It Got Right, What It Got Wrong

The novel, published on July 1, 1984, predicted the World Wide Web, cyberspace, and a lot of other things. Which of William Gibson's predictions have come true, and which still seem far off?

Mark Sullivan, PC World

The tantalizing question about William Gibson’s ideas in his novel Neuromancer involves their relationship with the course that the Web took and continues to take as Neuromancer’s publication date--July 1, 1984, 25 years ago today--recedes farther into the past. In his afterword to the 2000 re-release of the book, novelist Jack Womack suggests that Neuromancer may have directly influenced the way the Web developed--that it may have provided a blueprint that developers who grew up with the book consciously or subconsciously followed. Womack asks

"what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?”