Hard-Wired Traumas: A Retrospective of “Neuromancer”
By Thomas Lynch
Look, I’m not here to evangelize about some sci-fi book written in 1984 because it “predicted Trump” or something asinine like that. There’s a misguided tendency to review science-fiction purely based on its novelty when it is new and its prescience when it is old, and books like “Neuromancer,” which flirt with the literary, suffer as a result. Don’t worry, I’ll still be talking about “what it got right”—but it would be a disservice to “Neuromancer” to peg it as merely the novel which predicted what the globalized internet might look like. It’s a good novel, whether it invented the cyberpunk genre or not, and you should read it because it offers some valuable psychological insight into what the globalized internet might do to us as people.