For Fans of William Gibson

People who came to Gibson late sometimes say Neuromancer feels dated, that the tech is wrong and the slang is impenetrable. They have it backwards. The specific wrongness of Gibson's tech is what makes the book immortal: a world shaped by cybernetics and corporate capture that got the aesthetics of our networked present exactly right while getting the mechanics completely wrong. The book is not a prediction, it is a feeling, and that feeling, of living inside a system too large to understand, is more accurate in 2024 than it was in 1984.

Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History are often treated as lesser Gibson because they are set in a recognizable present rather than a projected future. That is precisely their achievement. By stripping away the science-fiction scaffolding, Gibson shows that the present is already as strange as anything he imagined in the Sprawl trilogy, that brand obsession, trauma, and surveillance are the cyberspace we actually inhabit. Cayce Pollard navigating her logo-allergy through post-9/11 London is one of the great characters in contemporary fiction.

After years of games that borrowed the aesthetic of cyberpunk without the politics, Cyberpunk 2077 arrived (in its patched, finished state) as a genuine engagement with the genre's core argument: that hyper-capitalism, body modification, and corporate sovereignty produce not liberation but a new and more intimate form of control. Night City is the Sprawl rendered walkable, and V navigating a city that will eat you alive unless you are already powerful enough to survive it is pure Gibson premise, even if the specifics come from Mike Pondsmith's tabletop universe.

Mamoru Oshii's 1995 adaptation of Masamune Shirow's manga arrived a decade after Neuromancer and asked its central question with more philosophical rigour than almost anything in the genre: if the mind can be copied, modified, and distributed, what exactly is the self? Major Kusanagi is a spiritual descendant of Gibson's Molly, a body augmented past the point where the original person is clearly still there, and her search for continuity of identity in a world that has made identity technically unstable is the great cyberpunk meditation on selfhood.