The megacity: an urban sprawl so huge, so monolithic, that it eats up most of continent —or a planet. It’s a familiar concept in sci-fi, and has been at least since the days of Fritz Lang and his titular Metropolis. One reason the megacity remains so prevalent is simple: while it seems futuristic and exotic, the fact is, the […]
School’s out for the year, the weather has broken into full blown summer, all mosquitoes and sunburn, and I’ve become intensely nostalgic for summer vacation, those long months when I was made out of nothing but time. Man, but did I get some reading done, huddled in front of a fan on those days it […]
With the new William Gibson book The Peripheral, the author’s first far-future story in two decades, arriving this month, it seems appropriate to take a look back at Neuromancer, his influential 1984 debut. Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in 1981, is widely regarded as the progenitor of the cyberpunk movement, a gritty neo-noir genre […]
Like the title says: autonomy, in all of its permutations, perversions, and absences, is the operative concept in Annalee Newitz’s adept debut novel, Autonomous, a thematically meaty sci-fi thriller set a dozen odd decades (or 20 minutes) into the future, in a not-quite-dystopian landscape in which much of the world has been carved up into economic […]
When I first read Count Zero, the follow-up to William Gibson’s cyberpunk game-changer Neuromancer, I was probably about the age of its protagonist, Bobby Newmark. Bobby was a Sprawl kid, a wannabe hacker from the uninterrupted urban corridor that stretches from Boston to Atlanta: semi-literate, naïve, and hungry. From the start, he’s almost lethally in […]
