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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.

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 ~~surf the web~~ "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.

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 because 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 ~