I admit, I have a problem with books. Once I own one, I don’t like letting it go. I’ve only ever faced the massed loss of books once, which was when I moved to the United States. I had room in my luggage for precisely three books, which I had to select from a collection in the hundreds.

Culturally, I should have been prepared. BBC Radio has a long running series called Desert Island discs, which invites celebrities to pick a selection of songs they’d take with them to a desert island. They also get to select a book. This is the sort of thing Brits discuss when we’re forced to talk to each other, like at parties where you’re not drunk yet and not a teenager.

In practice, being reduced to three books was almost the end of me. It took days to decide, and by the time I’d come to a sensible conclusion I was actually in the air and half way across the Atlantic. In the end, I packed two books and bought one at the airport.

The novel I took with me was Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

It has a heck of an opening line. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”. These days, I wonder whether that is even possible anymore. Does anyone still tune televisions? At the time it was the perfect drop kick evocation of things being really different and not necessarily pleasant. This isn’t a future we’re guaranteed to enjoy.

One of the fun things about being aware of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and their contemporaries, was the thrill of seeing an artistic movement unfold. Cyberpunk spawned books, games, stories, clothing, pictures (digital and analog), music and interest in the future of computers. It’s not the first time geek/nerd culture had made its presence felt in the mainstream, but it was the first time that culture had arrived with a sort of sneer and the suggestion that it might be cooler than what everyone else was doing. With it came the notions of actually being involved in a counterculture. Hacking, cracking, phreaking, crypto…all these words bubbled into the vocabulary of readers everywhere, and much like William Gibson not all of us understood what they involved. But we were all subject to the same frisson. This was a cultural movement for your inner criminal.

I hadn’t been part of a cultural movement before. I’d missed out on New Wave science fiction, on Cubism, on Impressionism, on everything. Cyberpunk, though, was happening at a time when I could tentatively join in. I dutifully bought some mirrorshades and started reading everything I could get my hands on. Neuromancer stood out.

The problem with science fiction is that it’s often written by engineers and scientists, or people who code, or people who know stuff. That means if you aren’t one of those people, or don’t at least have an interest in the stuff, you might get lost quite quickly. William Gibson seemed like he was more interested in the people rather than the nuts and bolts. This was where I first encountered a story written on the edge of the idea. Hard SF was all about the thing. The idea, the science, the piece of kit and how people interact with it. You can tell really well written hard SF when you don’t notice what the Thing is and are enthralled by the story. Poorly written Hard SF comes with a Thing and some cardboard cutouts that the author moves through a series of scenarios in which the Thing is important. William Gibson is credited with creating the term Cyberspace, but it’s not at the heart of Neuromancer and isn’t the book’s major feature. In fact the Matrix is old news at the start of the book, as commonplace as roads. If you look too closely at the computer technology of Neuromancer, you realise that William Gibson was wonderfully unencumbered by research. It’s something he admits, saying that he imagined the computers as mysterious crystalline engines and being quite disappointed by the reality. There are lessons in this book.

It’s a book that inspired me to try my hand at writing Cyberpunk, at trying some of the techniques William Gibson employed. It was interesting to find parallels between the works of Ian Fleming and this book, for example. Fleming peppers the Bond novels with brand names. They’re aspirational, meant to evoke wealth or style. Gibson’s future world is commercial and his use of brands is to create a sense of familiarity, to invoke the design ethic of some items so we can better imagine how his world looks. It’s a technique you can steal, and use to create passable pastiches. So there I was, pinching that and a couple of other techniques. A literary script kiddie. The point, though, wasn’t to be William Gibson. The point was to find the tools, use the tools to do something else, then make my own tools. Neuromancer taught me to hack.

The Brew.

It’s quite hard to pair this book with something other than bourbon or sake, but let’s be disciplined and let’s be true to the Brew. You could go with a generic light beer, something like Budweiser maybe, which is a perfectly drinkable beer in it’s own right (and let’s face it, there are defintely situations where the only thing that will do is an ice cold mass produced American beer) [Editors note: David will soon be deported from Britain for this comment.] but Neuromancer is an important book and I want something equally interesting to go with it.

Dragon Smoke Stout by the Beowulf Brewing company goes well with Neuromancer. It’s dark and complex, like the novel, and as bitter as the protagonist when he starts out. There’s some oaty substance and a genuinely smokey finish which should really make this a beer for autumn or winter. Like the book, the beer parades itself. You can taste the elements which make it special and given that it’s something you can’t just gulp down the palate work out is something you’ll be happy about.

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Born in England, David Webb tried to identify his ancestral roots by having his DNA tested. The lab results came back accompanied by a note reading simply “oh dear.”

He lives somewhere in the middle of England, where his tendency for sarcasm and his crippling addiction to tea pass without comment by the general population. He likes reading and writing, history, science fiction and things that are silly, neatly combining all of these by venerating (as all Brits surely do) Doctor Who.

He recently acquired a Bowler hat and is not afraid to wear it in public. You can find more of his writing here.