Posted already, 45 posts above yours ;)
JeffL
1710
What would be the best books to read to get ready for this world? The only cyberpunk novel I’ve ever read was Neuromancer.
Snow Crash is an obvious choice. Altered Carbon too.
A word of warning. My wife and I both found Snow Crash an atrocious read a dozen years back and it was enough to put us off the genre for a long time. Not sure exactly why that novel has such a reputation as a must read.
Ok, maybe you are right. I read it as a teenager (and translated!), so I don’t know how much it holds up now.
If you haven’t read Count Zero, which is the sequel to Neuromancer, you should definitely read that. Burning Chrome, which is a collection of William Gibson short fiction, is also an interesting read.
I need to finally read Neuromancer, I think. I keep thinking that I’ve read it, for some reason, even though I haven’t.
It hasn’t aged well, through no fault of its own. The curse of groundbreaking works that invent and define an entire genre is that they are imitated by so many later works and end up influencing so many other works even in other genres that they seem almost bland and predictable upon revisiting. Someone reading it for the first time now , after being exposed un-knowingly to countless works that copied from it, would probably perceive it as almost an uninspired regurgitation of many standard genre tropes.
It is very well written, though.
Is it primarily about the ideas and technology then? If it’s about characters, then the regurgitation of tropes feeling shouldn’t matter too much. But if it’s only about presenting the reader with ideas, then I guess it won’t have aged well.
I think the Matrix (original only) is a good comparison. The action and the characters hold up okay and someone viewing it today for the first time could appreciate that. But it also had some really interesting and intriguing idea about VR and computers (re)defining reality in it that definitely added to the impact for first time viewers. It would be impossibly for a new viewer seeing the Matrix now might appreciate the action and characters, but those concepts are humdrum and un-exciting and everywhere now so they can’t recapture the magic of experiencing Matrix upon release.
Characters and action hold up well. Some plot twists a modern reader might be able to see coming now that they have been done to death.
But the prose is beautiful. The rhythm, the ellipsis, the jumping around. It really works imho, and it’s still worthwhile.
Saying it hasn’t hold up is like saying The Big Sleep hasn’t hold up because everybody knows detective stories.
All of this. It is really a beautifully written book. And no, it isn’t really about the tech- Gibson was actually pretty uninterested in that (hell, I understand he wrote the thing on a manual typewriter). The setting, characters, and especially prose are aces, and he never attained that level again. It absolutely holds up.
Count Zero is actually a pretty great version of what a world-spanning Cyberpunk RPG would be like. Nothing great, but it is fun. And the stories in Burning Chrome are still solid, especially the title story.
Snow Crash is terrible and its focus on the tech means it really hasn’t aged well. Altered Carbon is still solid, but sometimes the copius sex and violence can get in the way.
On that note (of good cyberpunk novels) Stand on Zanzibar and the Shockwave Rider are pretty spectacular too.
I think the problem is finding stories that are really ‘cyberpunk’, this is, that they don’t forget the punk part. Several of them are more ‘cyber-noir’ than anything, focusing on a detective figure or whatever.
And many works (specially contemporary) are post-cyberpunk, keeping the world building, but not the dystopian/countercultural ethos. That’s a different way of losing the punk in cyberpunk.
JeffL
1725
So which novels would best immerse you in the world in which Cyberpunk 2077 places you?
How about These?
Both of these novels were made into sourcebooks for 2020 by R. Talsorian. Walter Jon Williams wrote the first novel, as well as the sourcebook based on it. He also play tested Cyberpunk.
It’s not the reading, it’s the remembering :/
Snow Crash is not terrible. It is the 90s rolled up into a phat mondo burrito.
I can still remember that the Deliverator’s tires have a contact patch the size of a fat woman’s thighs.
