Tuned to a Dead Channel

It's 2024, and the world of Neuromancer is finally upon us. Moreover, it's steadily being surpassed, fiction paling in comparison with reality, which is slowly developing.

William Gibson foresaw our current world in the middle 1980s. Back then, even the Internet didn't exist; was, in point of fact, a glittering digital diamond in the mind's eye of so many programmers and computer developers. It was the DARPA Net then, used exclusively by the Pentagon and intelligence services to help facilitate the business of national defense. Now, it is everything we do every day of our lives, day in and day out. It's how we shop, socialize, present ourselves to the world, do our banking and business transactions; communicate instantaneously with people on the other side of the world. Now, it is in every pocket, on every phone. With the advent of Elon Musk's Neuralink microchip implant, it will, one day soon, be beamed into every human skull. In the future the computer will not be a device you simply use; you will be the device that IT uses as well.

"In the future, everyone will be living in a TV studio," declared J.G. Ballard, in an interview with Re/Search magazine in 1982. With the advent of YouTube, we can see how prophetic this observation was. Science fiction does not date well because, in reality, IT DOES NOT EXIST. Eventually, ALL science fiction becomes science fact, and the naysayers, scoffers, and skeptics end up, borrowing a term I have a strong dislike for, "on the wrong side of history."

But to say much more about that would derail the purpose of this essay. Which is to review the BBC radio drama of Neuromancer. I have listened to it numerous times, concurrent with an audiobook version actually read by William Gibson. I prefer Gibson's reading, of course, but the radio drama is a different animal; the audio of a television show with no image, except that conjured up in the neural network of the listener.

Tuned to a Dead Channel

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." This is the first line of Neuromancer, the saga of the deadbeat computer hacker Case, whose nervous system has been destroyed by his former employers as punishment for stealing from them. We should point out that the morality of the Neuromancer world is permeable and fluid.

Case is ensconced in a small cement "coffin" hotel room in Chiba City, Neo-Tokyo, a cyberpunk megacity of corruption and crime, wherein he hangs out at the bar owned by Ratz, a fat, hardboiled barkeep with a cybernetic arm. Case is worried Wage, a crime boss is out to kill him, but then he gets hijacked by the beautiful, cybernetically enhanced Molly Millions, who works for the mysterious Armitage, an old-style noir detective villain. Armitage provides the surgery that allows Case to "Jack-in" to the Matrix again; i.e. become one with the cybernetic Brainscape wherein he can operate outside the limitations of the human body, in the digital world. Armitage instructs Molly to infiltrate the corporate offices of Sense Net to kidnap a copy of the "Dixie Flatline," a human consciousness that has been "uploaded" as a "construct" to cyberspace. Are you following all of this?

Case has a "sim stim" hookup with Molly, where he can see what she sees and feel what she feels while jacked into cyberspace. Armitage turns out to be Corso, a Colonel who was injured to the point of death during "Operation Screaming Fist" (the name was borrowed by Gibson from a song by Canadian punk band The Viletones), a military operation against Russia trying to implant a "first generation virus called Mole". Confused?

Along the way to 'The Spindle," a floating luxury space station, Neuromancer presents us with a graphic novel panoply of anarchists, telepaths, space Rastafarians, and "street samurai." We are introduced to a new concept: the AI. Neuromancer was written at a time before AI even existed.

Case is contacted by an AI called "Wintermute." Wintermute, we later find, wants to "merge" with another AI, called "Neuromancer." This merging will, despite Cases's earlier observation that AIs can often be "as dumb as dogs," bring about an artificial supermind. Gibson foresaw this in the middle Eighties; today, experts in Artificial Intelligence talk about a future in which AI will have reached a singularity, when it will achieve AGI, or "Artificial General Intelligence," a massive intellectual capacity and self-awareness, when it will have surpassed the human capacity to reign it in. This is the future world awaiting, for better or for worse. Whatever it means for life afterward remains to be seen.

Neuromancer the play has a finale in space, a final confrontation that disappears down the rabbit hole of the listener's understanding. There are criminal elements from the highest echelons of society, the Tessier-Ashpoole dynasty in criogenic suspension, floating in their resort space station, and Lady 3Jane, their female scion who wishes to halt the progression of Neuromancer thenew, child-like, self-aware computer superintellect.

The finale is that reality, as regards cyberspace, is revealed to be as permeable and illusory as the morality of Neuromancer, as the hardboiled, Chandleresque characterizations pay testament to. This audio dramatization presents a truncated version of Gibson's prophetic vision, but the noir and hardboiled crime thriller aspects, borrowed from James Cain, and Dashiel Hammett and, of course, Raymond Chandler, and mixed with the high-tech poetry of the cyberpunk genre's bitter, dystopian dreamscape, come through, along with some of the clever, semi-satirical dialog of the bitter, cynical narrator.

There are snatches of Japanese pop tunes, vaguely oriental melodies, electronic and digital sound effects. Voice performances are solid, and characterizations spring to mind straight from the pages of Black Mask, by way of Heavy Metal, perhaps.

A competent radio drama, entertaining enough for repeated listens. For the full effect (characters, such as Jules and Linda Lee are omitted here), listen instead to the audiobook version read by the author.

He dreamed the future, and it became the world.

Starring the voices of John Shrapnel, Nicola Walker, Owen McCarthy, and James Laurenson. Dramatized by Mike Walker. Directed by Andy Jordan. From the novel by William Gibson.

NEUROMANCER - CYBERPUNK STORY - BBC RADIO DRAMA 2002

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