Neuromancer begins with a brilliant, highly memorable line: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." The novel was first published in 1984, when very few people had access to computers. Famously, William Gibson wrote the book on a typewriter. But despite this, it goes on to draw a vivid portrait of a futuristic world where data is currency and business is done in "cyberspace", though companies can also be hacked into and robbed. And, shimmering mysteriously in the background, there are powerful AIs that no one really understands.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is one of the most popular sci-fi books of all time, and together with William Gibson's Neuromancer it stands as a foundational text of the cyberpunk movement. Science fiction author Anthony Ha was blown away by Snow Crash when he first read it back in the late '90s. "This was a period when there were some clunky representations of virtual reality in movies and TV," Ha says in Episode 487 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "So it wasn't that Snow Crash was the first time I encountered that kind of iconography, but it was the first time it actually seemed cool." Snow Crash tells the story of Hiro Protagonist, a katana-wielding hacker who jumps back and forth between dystopian Los Angeles and a virtual world called the Metaverse.

William Gibson published his classic novel Neuromancer almost 40 years ago, but it still feels fresh today. Science fiction author Matthew Kressel has been a fan of the book ever since reading it back in 1987. "When I first read Neuromancer, everything I had read before that was golden and silver age [sci-fi]--Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Asimov, all that stuff," Kressel says in Episode 477 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "So when I encountered Neuromancer, I was like, 'What is this? Science fiction of the '40s and '50s tended to evoke a consensus future of jetpacks, flying cars, and domestic robots. Neuromancer helped crystallize an alternative view of the future, one dominated by hackers, drugs, and mega-corporations. This darker view, which came to be called cyberpunk, proved far more prophetic. "More than any other science fiction book that I can think of, Neuromancer conveys what the future is going to feel like," says Geek's Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley. Science fiction author Sam J. Miller constantly finds himself discarding story ideas because he realizes that Neuromancer beat him to the punch. "The ideas are so dense and exciting," he says. "If you were to rip off half the things in this book and use them in a book now, it would be amazing.

Sci-fi writer William Gibson says the best way to imagine new technologies and how they could affect society is not through current expertise but by talking to "either artists or criminals." Sci-fi writer William Gibson says the best way to imagine new technologies and how they could affect society is not through current expertise but by talking to "either artists or criminals." Like a lot of science fiction fans, I read William Gibson's visionary novel Neuromancer not long after it came out in 1984. It painted a dystopian world where people spent most of their time on computers communicating across networks in "cyberspace." When I read it, I thought it was an engaging fantasy.