Like many of you, growing up Neuromancer played a pivotal role in how we thought about the future and where “cyberspace” was going. Things have turned out very different. Although the underlying mass of data and consciousness is still there, it’s not the fully immersed 3D world some are still clinging to. [William Gibson], author of the seminal novel, has recognized this and readers will find his recent works like Spook Country, are set very firmly in the now, with technology like location sensitive augmented reality. io9 sat down with him during a San Francisco visit to talk about his fondness for Vancouver, the inability of authorities to maintain secrets, if his novels are really dystopian, and whether moving to Canada counts as draft dodging if you never get drafted.

OK, so it’s two questions. What happens when the past becomes so prevalent it is no longer even considered “the past”? When the availability of the archive destroys the very concept of the archive?

To give some context, the question comes from a post, from an English prof’s blog, that embeds a Lemonheads video from 1992, and includes the following academic-speak.

For those of us who came of age when mass media had become a hegemonic force so pervasive that it practically needed no ideology to justify it, it’s harder and harder not to look back. The past is available everywhere today: from eBay to YouTube. It no longer needs to be “demystified” by theorists because its abutment to the contemporary interfaces that display it renders it ironic.

Lest it seem that the above refers only to the web, from which reality is a safe retreat where time behaves well, consider the following look forward from William Gibson.

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable… Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.

Putting the above together, the distinction between “here and now” and “everywhere and all the time” is blurring for us, and will cease to be visible or relevant later this century. I’m not sure I believe that, but it’s an interesting thought with which to start the week.

The Gibson quote is from a Rolling Stone interview, which I found via Glyn Moody. I found the question of the day via Liz Hand.

As first reported on JoBlo, and repeated on Slashfilm, Hayden Christensen is cast as Case in the upcoming Neuromancer film helmed by Joseph Kahn.  First, I have a terrible feeling about Christensen playing Case, and I’m not just talking about his abysmal performances in the the Star Wars prequels (did anyone see Life as a House in 2001).  Case exudes a shut-the-fuck-up, I-don’t-give-a-shit, who-the-fuck-woke-me-up attitude.  Just look at Christensen, the best look he can give is a blank stare and a fake laugh.

More importantly the issue I take with this production of Neuromancer is that I believe its time has past.  Don’t get me wrong, I love cyberpunk, and I think Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw’s recent “The Pefect Wave” novelette in Asimov’s (January 2008) is par excellence!  The thing is that William Gibson’s Neuromancer is twenty-four years old.  It was mind-blowing SF at its initial publication, and it heralded the beginning of cyberpunk.  Additionally, it furthered the postmodern project in SF.  Neuromancer is still future-oriented SF, but without a proper script and a dedicated director who “gets” cyberpunk and Neuromancer, it will, as others have pointed out, become the next Johnny Mnemonic film.  Another point about timing has to do with Gibson’s own recent SF.  His last novel, Spook Country, is SF, but it’s about the past (and not in a steampunk kind of way).  Gibson locates the future in the recent past in that novel (see also his short story, “The Gernsback Continuum”).

Of course, I’m speaking as a fan rather than as a critic regarding the production of Neuromancer.  I welcome any and all narratives whether they are textual, filmic, or otherwise.  However, professionally, I would prefer to talk about something hard-hitting, interesting, and well executed than something that I would consider a dead weight to American culture.