'Snowden could be Case's back-office support, an ex-spook trapped behind Putin's iron curtain, offering intermittent but vital support to people trapped in the system's relentless gear grinding.'Īs the world has caught up with Gibson's vision, the author, now 66, has turned his gaze closer to the present. 'The Ed Snowden moment is very Gibsonian,' adds Doctorow. Yet our world has enough of a Gibsonian hue for the writer to have acquired the mantle of a prophet. Despite Facebook's $2.3bn purchase of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset system, we remain some way from Neuromancer's favourite entertainment: 'simstim', where users share a star's whole sensory experience. Other features of the novel are still lumbering towards us from the horizon. As Gibson himself has joked, Neuromancer has a 'complete absence of cellphones, which I'm sure young readers must assume is a key plot point'. Every social network, online game or hacking scandal takes us a step closer to the universe Gibson imagined in 1984. Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander is a facsimile of Molly Millions, the femme fatale in Neuromancer. The Wachowskis made The Matrix by mashing Gibson's vision together with that of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Other novelists are held in higher esteem by literary critics, but few can claim to have had such a wide-ranging influence. In predicting this future, Gibson can be said to have helped shape our conception of the internet. It sold more than 6m copies and launched an entire aesthetic: cyberpunk. On its release, Neuromancer won the 'big three' for science fiction: the Nebula, Philip K Dick and Hugo awards. Neuromancer, winner of the 'big three' for science fiction: the Nebula, Philip K Dick and Hugo awards What once seemed impossibly futuristic is now eerily familiar. A junkie-hacker, Case, is coaxed into hacking the system of a major corporation. Gritty urban clinics carry out horrendous sounding plastic surgery. This network can be 'jacked' into, while in the real world characters flit from Tokyo to the Sprawl, an urban agglomeration running down the east coast of the US. In Neuromancer, published 30 years ago this month, Gibson popularised the idea of cyberspace: a 'consensual hallucination' created by millions of connected computers.

He has been right about a great deal, but mainly about the shape of the internet and how it filters down to the lowest strata of society.

Since the late 70s, the American-born novelist has been pulling at the loose threads of our culture to imagine what will come out. William Gibson knows this as well as anyone. Being proven right about a piece of technology or a trend distracts from the main aim of the work: to show us how we live now. P rescience can be tedious for science-fiction writers.

Neuromancer novel