Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how eerily prescient Gibson was in so many ways—but also by what he didn’t anticipate. You can still smoke in a bar, for one. Also, print media is still the norm (maybe it makes a comeback?), and discarded newspapers blow through the streets of Manhattan. Most noticeably, not a single person in the book uses a mobile phone. There are levitating trains but no cellular devices—at one point, the main character is stalked by the ringing of payphones (very Matrix).</p><p>But what stands out most of all is that the vast amount of technology described in Neuromancer is either Japanese or German. The Standard Hitachi Pocket Computer, the Sanyo Vacuum Suit, and the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 from Hosaka Computer? All Japanese. The Braun Coffee Maker, the Braun Microdrone, and the Telefunken Entertainment Console? All German. Not one piece of American tech I can think of is mentioned. Even one of the spacecraft is built by the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, a fictional German-Japanese manufacturer.</p><p>Which should hardly be surprising. In 1984, the future of technology looked distinctly non-American: Japan was dominating consumer electronics (think: Sony Walkmans and Pioneer Laserdisk players). The only Microsoft products were software and a mouse; Apple had only just released the first Macintosh. Gibson’s assumption that all of the state of art technology in the future would be Japanese makes all the sense in the world."</p><p><a href="https://mbh4h.substack.com/p/neuromancer-2025-review-william-gibson" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">mbh4h.substack.com/p/neuromanc</span><span class="invisible">er-2025-review-william-gibson</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SciFi" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SciFi</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Cyberpunk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Cyberpunk</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Fiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Fiction</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Neuromancer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Neuromancer</span></a></p>