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.