Complicity
In his interview with Paradoxa magazine (collected in About Writing), Samuel R Delany excavates the seeds of Neuromancer’s fame: “an extraordinarily uninformed article in a mid-eighties issue of Rolling Stone” and “a series of Big Movie Deals”.
With these markers in place, Gibson became a topic of conversation that then stabilised his fame. So that eventually he is claimed as influence on the Virgin Doctor Who novels and computer magazines mention him in connection to VR and Multi-Media, and so I pick up Neuromancer in 1993 and find myself writing about it now. So we are all that much more likely to write about him rather than “Russ, Disch, Zelazny, Crowley, and Le Guin” and “Gene Wolfe, Octavia Butler, Michael Swanwick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Sheperd, Karen Joy Fowler, Greg Bear…” And I might add: Kathleen Ann Goonan, Nalo Hopkinson, Maureen F McHugh, Gwyneth Jones, and Kate Orman. And more!
And so the value and meaning of Neuromancer, of Gibson, of those other authors, and of science fiction, is distorted.
I can only offer this apology for my complicity (and promise to write about Gibson only once more this year).