Tag Archives: cyberpunk

More than twenty years after author William Gibson coined the word cyberspace, I finally got around to reading one of his so-called cyberpunk novels. Count Zero, the scifi sequel to his famous Neuromancer, is a hipster’s view of a post-apocolypse America where giant corporations with biotech consumer products rule everything and almost everyone. This was in the days before the GUI made the Internet accessible to ordinary people. So this is a scifi notion of the computer net, via brain electrodes, as a means of augmenting normal thought–and a pathway to the gods. Altogether a far cry from Facebook or displaying baby pictures on the Web. Strange stuff, with an underlying secret-agent-man plot. I enjoyed it. But that might be because I enjoy the Web. I’m not sure I would have cared for this when it came out back in 1986.