One of my favorite science fiction authors has a blog. Gibson is often called the father of the cyberpunk movement. His descriptions of console cowboys cruising cyberspace definitely struck a chord with many a nethead in books like Neuromancer and Count Zero.
He’s made the classic mistake, the one he’s sworn he’d never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn’t sure how he’d been discovered, not that it mattered now. He’d expected to die, then but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because–still smiling–they were going to make sure he never worked again.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
I read several of Gibson’s books back in my high-school and college days. And most of my peers shared the dream of a future where we’d be able to jack in to the bright geometric landscape of cyberspace that Gibson described.
