Continuing on my track of re-reading the works of @GreatDismal , I just finished Virtual Light. It had been a while since I'd read it only once, so I had forgotten almost everything about it except for Chevette's name and the fact that it was centered on bike messenger culture in San Francisco.

If you're a fan of the #cyberpunk genre, I would encourage you to re-read these early works again now that it's been nearly 40 years since they were written. I'm picking up so many things that I missed the previous times that I've read them, and that's largely due to having the context of being "future-forward" past the timelines of those books.

It's not about just seeing what technology predictions the authors got right or missed, or even the aesthetics of the worlds they created, however important they may be to our imaginations. It's the characters themselves and the attitudes and perceptions of the events that, now some 30-odd years after the fact, we have all had the opportunity to experience for ourselves as we've watched the inexorable encroachment of technology.

These books are no longer set in our "future" and I would wager to say that the characters had more appropriate responses of revulsion to the invasion of technology that we, here in the now "present", have failed to recognize and share.

And now, to take a break from Gibson, I'm going to give Snow Crash another review, to hopefully look at it with a fresh perspective and a whole lot more life experience than I had the last time I read it.
@SynAck I read it for the first time recently, it was infuriating to realize how many tech bros must have read this and taken it as a guideline for how to shape society

@SynAck
Snow Crash is an experience, but typical of Stephenson's fat-butted works. You read 1/3 or 1/2 the book and it veers off 90° and goes somewhere else, and WTF was I reading?

I should dig in the boxes and see if I still have my Ace copy of @GreatDismal's Neuromancer. It was beat to crap the last time I saw it, maybe 10-15 years ago. Even if it's around, I'd be afraid to open the cover. My aged PB copy of Simmons's Hyperion fell apart last time I re-read and Neuromancer is 10 years older?

@SynAck @GreatDismal They feel fresh for me every time.
@SynAck can you recommend a good one to start with?
@brindy @SynAck start with Neuromancer and work your way through. They’re all good, and you’ll appreciate how the stories become less fantastical as the settings get closer to present day. If you’re lucky, Gibson will have published book 3 of the current series by the time you finish Agency 😀
@SynAck that’s really strange and cool, the concept that we’re in a different future to the one he envisioned. Almost like timelines diverged at some point, which neatly ties into the underlying idea of his current Jackpot series 🤔
@SynAck @GreatDismal
I also read Virtual Light recently. I was amazed how prescient it was for something published so long ago.
I'm also going to re-read some of his other books.
#cyberpunk

@SynAck @GreatDismal

I just fairly recently started reading his works and now I'm pretty much committed/addicted to reading all of them. The imagined world of Neuromancer from 40 years ago, compared to what now passes for "AI"... I'm not sure which is actually more dystopian. I think I might prefer the former.