It’s been 25 years since “Neuromancer” by William Gibson (Personal website) was first published. This ground breaking work has been credited more than once with if not inventing, then at least evolving the idea of the Internet and ‘Cyberspace’.

It’s funny how a book that has – at least partly – laid foundation for the methods used and the systems involved in total surveillance was published in “1984″. The world Neuromancer described wasn’t the 1984 of George Orwell, and it never intended to be, but it showed how technology is becoming part of your lifes, as well as showing how it can be misused.

The story was set in a “near future” and even though some of the stuff that made it science fiction is already available or has even found it’s place in our everyday life, it still feels like a dystopia about to take place in a time not to far from now. Having read the great “Eclipse” triology by John Shirley (Personal website), a while ago once again, and bearing in mind the Neuromancer books, the ‘worlds’ they created appear to describe a future we’re rapidly moving forward to. Am not to sure whether I’ll like it.

Side note: If you haven’t read any of the works mentioned in this post, do it now. While I believe that Megacorps are already forming and the fascist movements of “Eclipse” might still be some decades away, “Neuromancer” feels like a bad, but fascinating tomorrow, just as it did in 1984.