He Really Is a Gibson v.2

There's something so distinctly synchronistic about choosing to read Gibson now, here, in 2025. Book that were published well in advance of me ever thinking to touch them. Neuromancer, published only the year after my parent's first date. Idoru, published right around the time that I picked up my first book on programming BASIC in elementary school. Really, there was no reason for me not to have read any of these books decades ago...

(Arguments for them not being "age appropriate" notwithstanding, I was reading Heinlein writing about plural marriages and time traveling incest long before any "age appropriateness" would've made that a good idea. Starman Jones nothing - Jumping straight into The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land? Good luck! But: I'm getting distracted)

There's no reason that I couldn't have read Neuromancer back when AI and virtual reality were pure science fiction: chatbots and arcade games. Or that I couldn't have read Idoru in a world that didn't know what YouTube or Twitch were: when celebrity was purely outside the digital realm, locked away from kids who started streaming Minecraft in their bedrooms when they were 13 (now turned into multi-millionaire content creators with brand partnerships and sponsorship deals). But... for some reason: I didn't.

No: I watched Johnny Mnemonic for the first time as quarantine lockdowns were beginning to come into effect in 2020. Lingering on the opening title scroll:

SECOND DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY.

CORPORATIONS RULE.

THE WORLD IS THREATENED BY A NEW PLAGUE

Cutting to the CGI shots of the Matrix complete with title card declaring "Internet - 2021" and then the wake up call screen showing the date: January 17, 2021 (incidentally, the screen shows this as a Thursday. It was actually a Sunday, and really weird that they didn't get that right: though maybe that's a quirk of the alternate history we have to accept for Gibson's universe to make sense).

A new plague? In 2021? Riots in the streets, with people in surgical masks clashing against police in central Beijing? What a fantastical and far fetched view of the future! How wild and implausible!

I read Neuromancer in February of 2025:

She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say

No, surely that must be a fiction. No way would corporations ever hand decisions over to AI (not that I'm calling our LLMs "AI" now, see my previous rant about that particular topic). What a dystopia that would be!

And now I'm currently reading Idoru:

"What did Blackwell mean, last night, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn't real?"

"Idoru," Yamazaki said.

"What?"

"'Idol-singer.' She is Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a 'synthespian,' in Hollywood."

Laney closed his eyes, opened them. "Then how can he marry her?"

"I don't know," Yamazaki said. "But he has very forcefully declared this to be his intention."

Let me just real quick scan the latest news. Oh wait, here it is from 4 days ago: Man Proposed to His AI Chatbot Girlfriend Named Sol - And here's a few articles about it

Somewhere along the lines, it looks like the simulation ran out of RAM and just started dipping into our fiction library and began cranking out plots that Gibson wrote about 29 years ago. Either that or Gibson was jacked into some feed that pretty accurately captured what the world was and where it was going... Sitting down and accurately scrying our future in the black mirror of his word processor (or typewriter: it wouldn't surprise me to find out that he used a typewriter). Echo back some of the sentiment of my fan letter (see previous post) - Did you ever think you'd be so close to the truth?? And if so... should we watch out for those earthquakes you warned us about? There's a reason that Maximum Mike stole the name "Gibson" for his cyberpunk streetslang:

Gibson: Strong foresight. A prophet; someone who tells the future. A psychic. Originally derived from William Gibson, the Patron Saint of the cyberpunk genre.