As a nation, we commemorate the "birthday" of the United States during the first week of July, reflecting on events occurring in Philadelphia in 1776. But what of the less-defined territory of cyberspace, the Web, of virtual worlds, and of the so-called matrix? Do those "locales" have a universally recognized date of origin, or birth date?
If they did, it could be argued the date of July 1, yesterday, would qualify. That's the publish date of William Gibson's futuristic novel Neuromancer (published by Ace Books on July 1, 1984). It is a novel many think foretold the creation of the world wide web and immersive 3D environments.
PC World writer Mark Sullivan reflects on Gibson's prophetic novel. "By introducing the concept of cyberspace, he made the Web a habitable place, with all the world's data stores represented as visual, even palpable, structures arranged in an endless matrix," he writes.
Sullivan posits that Gibson's cyberspace "turned computing into an experience that involved all of the senses." That once "inside" cyberspace, the user can experience "intense beauty, such as the sight of the huge, shining cities of data."
In Gibson's words:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
Sound familiar?
VirtualWorldsNews, VirtualGoodsNews and 3DTLC.net wish readers a wonderful 4th of July weekend.
And if you are looking for some holiday reading, well, you know what we'd recommend.
Too bad TRON came out years earlier.1982
and VR/networked societies have been part of scifi novels for a century.
Neuromancer read like a boring rehash of Blade Runner, 1982 movie, and many P. Dick books.
Posted by: chris | July 02, 2009 at 02:45 PM
"Neuromancer read like a boring rehash of Blade Runner, 1982 movie, and many P. Dick books."
wrong.
Posted by: Luce Imaginary | July 02, 2009 at 06:27 PM