In other words, characters from The Peripheral could suddenly start interfering with the plotlines established long ago in Neuromancer. Gibson could start rewriting his own science fiction history! It would be better, he seems to be saying, just to leave well enough alone.

But here’s the thing: Neuromancer already is a stub. Every novel, in its own way, is a new branching universe, and when we read these fictions our paths change — as mine unambiguously did.

I first read Neuromancer in 1986, while lying on a tatami mat in Taipei. I was in a part of the world where everyone was convinced that the 21st century would belong to China, and I already felt like I was living in the future. But there was no resisting Gibson’s science fiction seduction. After finishing the novel, I hungered to have my own neural pathways realigned in the “black clinics of Chiba”; to wrestle with artificial intelligences yearning to be free. And that “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace? I wanted it, and I wasn’t alone. A generation finished Neuromancer and promptly went looking for a way to jack in. And we found it! Gibson reports that during every book tour, “some 50 or 60 people announce themselves as owing their now well established career in some digital business to having read Neuromancer when they were 10.”

In the alternate universe in which I didn’t read Neuromancer, I stayed in China and became a foreign correspondent, instead of a reporter who made a career of covering “the Internet” (and wrote for publications with titles such as, believe it or not, “Cyberspace Today.”) Ever since reading Neuromancer I’ve been living in a Neuromancer stub. And I don’t mind. It’s a pretty cool universe.

So having read The Peripheral, the natural question becomes: what stub am I living in now? At least one of the futures described in the book is just around the corner. It’s a world in which we use 3D printing technology to build our food and drugs and phones, and drones hover protectively around us like so many airborne guardian Dobermans. With the concept of the jackpot now embedded in my head, am I ready for a rolling apocalypse?

Gibson himself might not be inclined to connect his literary stubs, but he couldn’t stop me from returning to Neuromancer after I finished The Peripheral to see how the futures compared. I wanted to link them with my own imagination. Where has Gibson been taking us?

I found my 30-year-old ACE paperback copy of Neuromancer and was immediately taken aback. Its pages are yellowing around the edges—not at all how I care to reminisce about the future. No matter how many new worlds spawn every nanosecond, in this universe there’s no getting around it: I’m getting old. I am nostalgic for decaying fantasies about the future. Talk about dystopia!

Gibson tells me that he never really bought into the whole cyberpunk obsession with gloom and doom. “That was never my thing,” he says. But he’s been unnerved by people who see The Peripheral as an optimistic book. They’re not paying close enough attention to what’s really going on, he says, although he tempers his observation with a caveat.

Maybe, as he ages, he’s just getting more ornery.

“I don’t know anyone whose opinion I would take very seriously who doesn’t give the current moment the serious side-eye, numerous times daily,” says Gibson. “But I do have a personal concern. When people reach a certain age — and this has been true throughout history — they look around them and go, ‘after us, the deluge.’ It’s just going to be fucked from here on out, the good times have passed. The ancient Greeks did that; the Mayans were probably doing that. It just seems to be a human thing to do in reaction to one’s own aging and decline.

“And so sometimes I wonder, am I just doing that? Is what I am feeling my version of that?”

It’s a fair question. The novels Gibson wrote in his youth are yellowing on our bookshelves. The drugs of our youth, the cyberspace matrices we were so eager to jack into, the fantasies of escape that we gobbled down — their efficacy tends to fade as “the real world” beats up on us. We have journeyed to the future, and just like any other frontier, getting through it turns out to be a pretty tough slog.

Whatever. I reread Neuromancer — yellow pages and all — and I think it held up. Certainly, it’s a youthful novel, with all the adrenaline and sex and drugs that youth demands. And it is of course amusing, in retrospect, that Gibson’s future failed to include cellphones or wifi, but one of Gibson’s greatest strengths has always been the quality of his prose. Good writing keeps ideas fresh. Where superlative style meets the future — that’s consistently William Gibson’s favorite universe. There’s also a heck of a lot of future in there that still hasn’t happened: rampaging AIs, embedded mirrorshades, personality constructs embodied in silicon. Ten years from now, we may find those impossibilities as commonplace as our smartphones or 3D printers.

But Neuromancer still works, and in any case, its impact can hardly fade. Gibson’s made it clear that he thinks it would be lazy or cheap to merge the universes he’s already created, but for his readers, that’s already a fait accompli. We’re citizens of all his stubs, and we have no choice but to let all his futures mingle. There’s a lesson of sorts that emerges out of all these jumbled quantum realities, from the yellowed pages of Neuromancer to the fresh hardcover of The Peripheral. Cyberspace may have seduced us with promises of escape — from our meat-bound existence, our humdrum lives — but the threat of the jackpot reminds us us that nothing’s ever quite that simple. The real world will always be a mess.

Animated Graphics by Jason English Kerr

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