I'm 100% convinced Keanu used WIlliam Gibsons voice as a reference for Johnny Silverhand. It sounds so similar

Nothing instills the sense of retro-futurism than a copy of Neuromancer sitting beside a Walkman. If you know, you know...

He wrote Neuromancer while I was still using a Vic-20, long before the public really knew about a thing called the internet, yet Gibson visualised not only the Internet, but a very likely future of the virtual-reality equivalent of the Internet, which was a big thing in the 90's, but the technology just wasn't there and sort of died and faded out of popularity. VR became popular again, imo when Oculus Rift where making waves in the tech community 2010(ish). He is a visionary.

Listening to William gibson readings of neuromancer gives me the same feeling/rush/awe of seeing a gorgeous car or a stunning woman, it throws me into a trance and takes my breath away and I’m just dumbfounded

Burning Chrome hit me like a ketamine brick when I was a teen. Late nights writing code and listening to industrial music, then that came along, phew.

Gibson invented 1.5 new genres, not bad considering most writers don’t even invent any.

Can you believe he is 43 years old here?

This is amazingly prescient considering that it was made a third of a century ago!

A true prophet of sci-fi up there with Jules Verne

Thanks. This series of videos has certainly been an unusual & entertaining look into the origins of cyberspace & the cyberpunk aesthetic. There have clearly been many, many stories involving computers, long before they were a common & central part of our personal lives. What's most fascinating to me is how, just when that was actually happening in the late 70s & early 80s - but long before anything like the internet ever began to take shape - we started telling ourselves new stories altogether. There seemed to be a very unconscious fear & loneliness - or the anticipation of such - in us, of becoming lost in a purely technological & computerized landscape. And right then, we saw stories emerge wherein writers of books, movies, etc., helped us deal with that, by envisioning just such a world. The protagonists of these tales did, indeed, find themselves in breathtaking vistas entirely wrought in ones & zeros - the digital bits of a computer dreamworld made real. It may have been exactly the right therapeutic regimen we needed, to prepare us for the blossoming age of the human / computer interface. I find it nothing short of amazing that a few people had the vision to look ahead and see some of the issues we would face, and the courage to show it to us before we were engulfed by it. So thank you to all those who gave us a little taste - and a warning - of things to come. tavi.

Gibson and Sterling are giants! It's fun there's also Timothy Leary throwing in his 5 cents.

"Tell me more about this Cyberspace..... do you think it will catch on?"

Nice to hear Kraftwerk's Technopop on this.

"I really don't think of myself as a predictive, extrapolative science fiction writer..." Sorry mate, that's what you are

Punk is outlaw. Dangerous. Anarchic. Gotta love it!

Thanks for uploading this.

Wonderful. Thank you!

"The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise was quoted extensively in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The parallel with Babbage's computing machines is made explicit, as allowing plausibility to the theory that transmutation of species could be pre-programmed." ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage )

Angel Biotech... where are you now

I used to love BBC2's The Late Show.

It just hit me; Hal Emmerich, aka Otacon and his Dad, Huey, bear a strong resemblance to William Gibson. Did Kojima also read Neuromancer?

Cyberspace, Microsoft, Yonderboy, the Matrix

It's not like I use drugs......my body has just grown a major drug defecency.

The Difference Engine... Is this the birth of steampunk?

It’s that accent that get to me. It’s reminds me of someone trying to covering up a southern accent. Maybe I’m projecting cuz I’m from Atlanta but it sounds like my friends and I talking. I mean he’s from North Carolina right?

5:08 is what we do all day in part to absorb content incl. Gibson's

6:36 with a Gertrude Stein quote? Nice reinterpretation of it.

God damn he was so right

with virtual reality being what it is, i really wish we had developed sim stim instead.

Why is this 2024 in a nutshell?

0:34 droid has left the chat

2:09 wait a second, burning chrome was earlier than neuromancer, right?

Almost sounds like William Gibson has a British accent in some parts of this.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My cyber garage was covered in cyber graffiti. "This has to be the work of those damn cyberpunks from up the street," I thought. I turned back from the window to face the television in the living room. It was tuned to a dead channel. An anger rose up inside me. The same anger that had helped me get through the GONGO-12 conflict in the BLING BLONG sector. "They cut my cable. Those damn cyberpunks cut my cable!" -William Gibson, The Cyberpunks.

He does time travel now ...

Harrowing.

so the vr already existed in the 90's huh...

No cyber does not mean pilot old son

The fateful year most of us elderly millennials were born...

Liberal arts majors will always be the most brilliant ppl

Cool, he's a great writer with a lot of style and creativity, yet he's so dismissive about everything surrounding cyberpunk, I guess he was afraid the fad would overwhelm his writing...

Gibson is overrated.