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Cyberpunk
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Book reviews/essays: Cyberpunk

The first book about cyberspace that I ever read was in about 1980. It was True Names , by Verner Vinge. I liked it way better than Neuromancer , which came out years later and is widely credited for inventing the subgenre of cyberpunk. I remember thinking, "This book introduces a whole new way of using computers in science fiction. In all previous SF books I read, advanced computers were compared to the human brain. In this book, the computer network is a sort of ocean that its users move around in." In other words, it introduced me to the concept of cyberspace before the word was even coined. As far as I know, it may actually qualify as the first cyberpunk novel, although it doesn't have the level of grittiness associated with the term. <p> I've heard that writers are taught to follow the guideline "show, don't tell". The protagonist in Neuromancer is someone who, we're told, desperately wants to <s>surf the web</s> "jack in" to cyberspace, but we're given only vague descriptions of what cyberspace is like, and I didn't feel that those descriptions showed me why cyberspace was cool. True Names definitely had that sense of wonder about cyberspace, under all the conflict of the story. <p> True Names remained my favorite for a decade, but Snow Crash has probably displaced it as my favorite. Although it's sometimes tongue-in-cheek (or maybe <em>because</em> of it -- the description in the first few pages of the armor needed to deliver a pizza is hilarious), it has very compelling descriptions of the Metaverse that make it seem like a great place to spend time, even without the contrastingly bleak descriptions of what the real world has become in the book. And the off-the-wall theory about the Sumerian language at the end was certainly creative and unexpected.

Bob Kanefsky ~