Opening Line
William Gibson’s Neuromancer opened 1984 with the following line:
The sky was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.
Right? Except that it didn’t. The opening line is, in fact:
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Above the port? That bit of scene setting seems superfluous. As does that comma, maybe. Yet the underlying sentence is strong enough to shine through these accretions, to make it science fiction’s most famous opening line.
The sentence works as pure word poetry, but it is also a quite literal metaphor. If you look at the night sky in Tokyo you’ll know what Gibson means. City light on city air, lots of watts on plenty of particles. A low-population, low-density city like Melbourne approximates the effect.
Peter Stockwell, in The Poetics of Science Fiction, delves even further:
The most readily accessible reading that resolves this metaphor is simply that the sky is a grey colour. But the metaphor also suggests that televisions are more basic and natural than sky. The “pathetic fallacy” of mainstream literature, whereby nature imitates human emotions, is reversed so that nature is alien and technology is familiar and comforting. This is further reinforced by mapping the attribute of a capacity for life onto the “channel”, which is “dead”. The potential for life is claimed for technology.
This idea isn’t exactly new, but it has never been expressed so eloquently as here by Gibson, and in that eloquence it becomes less sense-of-wonder, less science fictional subject, and more the-world-as-it-is, more an a priori for the genre. We’re in Junk City.
None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.
In 2007, the world’s urban population finally exceeded the rural population. Of the urban dwellers, one third live in slums.
By sabik, 3 hours, 25 minutes after the fact
It’s also interesting in the way it’s dated… only a dozen years later, another author used the same metaphor — for a clear blue sky.
The colour of television, tuned to a dead channel, has been overtaken by the march of technology. March, do I say? Nay, rush.
By David Golding, 5 hours, 40 minutes after the fact
Even I’ve riffed on this “dating”—but the ways in which Gibson has dated are, I think, the least interesting things about his fiction. One of his chief messages has always been how things can change rapidly and unexpectedly, how prediction fails. Much more interesting are the ways he embodied certain understandings of his time, or even invented new (mis)understandings.
And if you think television has seen a rush of technology in the last 25 years, then you must be watching a different channel to me!
By Bowie, 12 hours, 3 minutes after the fact
I never liked Gibson’s metaphor. A dead channel to me spoke of static. Black and white moving dots. I imagined a chaotic sky filled with hell that somehow the inhabitants of the book ignored. No world could be that crazy…