Happy New Year and welcome to the January issue of Hacker Chronicles!

This issue continues our three-part read-along of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Enjoy!
/John

Writing Update

Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Circle gave me the international conflict and sweeping-tapestry inspiration I needed. I've now moved on to reading more police procedurals to work on the investigative side of the mystery genre.

Writing out of order has been a challenge. When I write from start to finish, I always know what scene to work on when I sit down. Now I'm faced with choosing which part to write next, and I'm thinking about ways to make that decision less of a blocker.

Here's where my writing currently stands:

Read-Along Neuromancer – “The Shopping Expedition” and “Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne”

Motivation and a Ticking Clock

Armitage has cured Case but keeps him on a tight leash. Armitage tells him:

You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving.

When Case asks how long, Armitage says:

You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but that's all. Do the job and I inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood change.

This is strikingly similar to how the character Snake Plissken is forced to take on his dangerous mission in Escape From New York.

The character Snake Plissken gets injected with micro-explosives.

Escape From New York was released in July 1981. Gibson's Burning Chrome was first read by Gibson himself at a convention in Denver in the autumn of 1981, and Neuromancer didn't come out until 1984. So Escape From New York was first. The Wikipedia article on Neuromancer also says "John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981) influenced Gibson's approach to world-building".

This you-will-automatically-die-unless-you-help-me setup is a forcing function which solves two things for authors. First, it motivates the main character to take on huge risks, and second, it adds a ticking clock. Today, I'd say it's viewed as a trope.

The Love of the Machine

I saw you stroke that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.

This is Molly talking to Case after he gets a maxed-out terminal to connect to cyberspace. I can relate. It takes me back to the 1980s when I dreamed of owning a computer. I would go to electronics stores and touch the computers on display. I later got an Atari ST and then an Amiga 500. Lucky me!

Japan's Stature

There are several references to Japan in the book, for instance Mitsubishi Bank of America in cyberspace.

Neuromancer was written during the heyday of Japan as an economic and industrial superpower. The US was afraid of being surpassed and losing, for instance, its car industry. Japan's economy eventually came crashing down in the Japanese asset price bubble leading to what was first the Lost Decade (the 1990s) but became the Lost Decades.

Mitsubishi in particular has a subsidiary called Mitsubishi Estate which has the most valuable portfolio in the Japanese real estate industry.

Mitsubishi Estate HQ.

Asian influence on cyberpunk is profound, and the success of Japan during the era when we got pocket calculators, digital watches, and home computers was a big part of that.

A similar anxiety today centers on China.

The Privacy Room

Case and Molly need to talk about what Armitage is up to. But they realize he is probably monitoring them. So Molly pays for an off-the-grid privacy room.

This makes me think of the listening assistant devices many of us have at home today. But I also recall the precautions Edward Snowden took when meeting with journalists at The Mira Hotel in Hong Kong. The most striking was that all mobile phones had to be powered off and placed inside the hotel room's refrigerator, effectively a Faraday cage.

The Mira Hotel in Hong Kong.

Gibson was very right about how hard it is to maintain privacy today. Even if you have made good choices about your devices and services, what have others around you done?

Interfacing With the Digital World

Cyberspace is typically described as a graphic representation of data, entities, and communication. Neuromancer certainly has that going with a clear visual interface and Gibson's description of ICE. I suspect the idea comes partly from computer games.

In reality, we often find ourselves using textual computer and network interfaces. Think of web search, messaging, and chatbots. Text as silent, succinct communication is both efficient and convenient. I love how such an old medium keeps proving itself.

But interfaces change and seem to move in waves. Text, images, audio, video, 3D. The fidelity of each improves over time. You might think that text has been static but just think of the rise of emoji!

Hacking as a graphical experience is still way off. It's still textual except for the means of tricking humans with visuals.

Stealing Dixie Flatline's Construct

We get a three-pronged heist against Sense/Net to steal the construct of a legendary hacker named Dixie Flatline.

• Case hacks Sense/Net's ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics.
• The Panther Moderns, a cybernetic street gang, create a diversion with an alleged biochemical attack on Sense/Net's ventilation system and fake terrorist attack at Sense/Net's HQ.
• Molly breaks into the Sense/Net's vault to physically steal the construct.

We learn that the construct is a static representation of the human who used to be Dixie Flatline. It's strikingly similar to today's large language models. A model trained in a certain moment in time with immense skills from that time but no ability to learn or change beyond that. The construct is a computer version of what the hacker Dixie Flatline was capable of and Armitage wants it as a copilot for Case when they attempt the big hack.

Case is able to see what Molly sees through a "simstim." It's unclear to me how that high bandwidth connection can work when she's deep inside the corporate vault.

Case's hack is vividly described as involving multiple steps of ice breaking. No surprise. Real hacking involves a lot of discovery along the way unless the hacker effectively has blueprints of the technical setup of the system under attack. Case does not have a blueprint, so the assumption here has to be that he develops each step of the hack before they execute the heist. Otherwise, it would be impossible to hack that quickly.

Wintermute and Colonel Corto

An AI called Wintermute reaches out to Case. He brings it up with Molly who thinks there's a connection with Armitage. She wants Case to investigate.

Case teams up with Dixie Flatline and hacks into Armitage's system in London. They discover some of his background. Armitage seems to have once been Colonel Willis Corto and part of the same hack against Russia where Dixie died. Corto was badly injured but saved so he could testify on what had happened. Once he had told his story, he was cast aside and became the bitter, underground force known as Armitage.

The government resurrecting a brain from someone who succumbed on duty reminds me of the movie Source Code which I reviewed in 2023.

Going Into Space

After the successful heist, Armitage violently recruits a man named Riviera in Istanbul to complete his team for the big one.

They head to a space station, or a cluster of them, called Freeside. Up there, they're getting ready to hack a conglomerate called Tessier-Ashpool, which seems to be Armitage's ultimate goal.

Wintermute is desperately manipulating both Case and Molly to go against Armitage or compromise the Tessier-Ashpool hack.

Next Up

In the next newsletter issue, we'll review the remainder of the book.

Currently Reading

I've started reading Ed McBain's Cop Hater, the first 87th Precinct novel, from 1956. It is considered the original police procedural. The Swedish authors Sjöwall/Wahlöö said openly that they were inspired by McBain's 87th Precinct series, and since they were the originators of the Scandinavian Noir genre, we're talking some serious OG crime fiction here. I recommend anyone who enjoys Scandinavian Noir to try Ed McBain.

The original cover of the paperback version of Cop Hater.

And I'm reading Neuromancer. :)