‘Neuromancer’ and “change everything” science fiction
FEBRUARY 13TH, 2016 — POST 040
William Gibson’s Neuromancer is considered one of the science fiction’s exemplary works. Standing alongside the titans of Dune and Foundation, Neuromancer has had one of the largest impacts on science fiction today, specifically in cinema. However, all three of these titles indicate at a mode of science fiction cinema has mostly been unable to access: the “change everything” sci fi.
The bulk of cinematic science fiction operates on the principle of “change one thing”. The Matrix turned reality into a computer simulation. That’s one thing. The world of Ghost In The Shell had sentient robots. That’s one thing. Moon just fast-forwarded to the point where mankind is mining resources on the moon. Again: one thing. Obviously, there are other changes that fall out from this one central change, but that does not disrupt the sense that these worlds are really just thisWorld+1.
But this isn’t just in cinema. Philip K Dick’s style of science fiction novel does too utilise this technique of thisWorld+1. The Man In The High Castle asks “What happens if the Nazi’s win WWII”? Minority Report has a world in which crimes can be seen and stopped before they’re even committed. It’s this constant figure of Dick’s worldbuilding that makes his work so endlessly adaptable to screen like the androids of “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep” turning into Ridley Scott’s seminal Blade Runner.
thisWorld+1 is an intelligent way to worldbuild, especially in the comparatively tight temporal constraints of a feature film. It makes the new world approachable and relatable to the audience. The viewer’s wonder exists in the gap between the spectral semblance of this world and the place the +1 has pushed the new world. However, I dispute the capacity for this technique to generate authentic worlds. If I consider our world as a potential sci fi projection from the middle of the twentieth century, I would be hard pressed to distill it to a thatWorld+1. Sure, computers. But also space travel. Sure, electric vehicles. But also marches toward equality of race, gender, and sexuality. And sure, destabilisation of the Middle East. But also the widespread use in this destabilisation of a weapon from 1947, the AK-47. Our world looks radically different from that of the 1950s through many more than one change.
The divergent complexity of a world is defused in the conforming to a thisWorld+1 paradigm. And Neuromancer just doesn’t bother with it. From cyberspace decks, to simstim, to off-Earth cities, to radically transformed economic balances, to sythesised narcotics, to cybernetic augmentations, to whatever the fuck else, Neuromancer is a complete transportation to a possible future. Without a single gap between our world and that of the novel, there is not a single space in which the reader’s wonder resides. Instead, the reader is whipped promptly into utter immersion, assited in no small part by the fierce technician Gibson is as a writer. It is a deliberatly confusing world: not for a lack of logic and consistency, but because it is simply a world the reader has such little purchase into. In the same way as a viewer in the 1950s watching a cinematic recreation of today’s world would be confused, this complete departure in world building is what makes Neuromancer such an indelible work of science fiction.
I just wish cinema had more similar works.
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