Delany. Most damning of all, it didn't seem to have been claimed by the generation it claimed to represent. Real punks did little reading, and the vast majority of young SF readers preferred to stick with traditional storytellers such as Larry Niven, Anne McCaffrey and even Robert Heinlein. Gibson's prose was too dense and tangled for casual readers, so it is not surprising that he gained more of a following among academics than among the sort of people it depicted. Heavy Metal comics and Max Headroom brought more of the cyberpunk vision to a young audience than did the fiction. Yet Neuromancer is historically significant. Most critics agree that it was not only the first cyberpunk novel, it was and remains the best. Gibson's rich stew of allusion to contemporary technology set a new standard for SF prose. If his plots and characters are shallow and trite, that mattered little, for it is not the tale but the manner of its telling that stands out. His terminology continues to pop up here and there. Whereas an earlier generation borrowed names from its favorite author, J. R. R. Tolkien, like "Shadowfax" (a new-age music group), "Gandalf" (a brand of computer data switch), and "Moria"; (an early fantasy computer game), today there is a proliferation of references to Neuromancer: " Meat Puppets" is a rock group, there was a computer virus called " Screaming Fist," the Internet is commonly referred to as "Cyberspace" or--occasionally--"the Matrix," and there are several World Wide Web sites are named "Wintermute."; Gibson produced his vision in a time when many people were becoming haunted by the idea of urban decay, crime rampant, corruption everywhere. Just as readers of the 50s looked obsessively for signs that Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four was coming true, some readers keep an eye out for the emergence of cyberpunk's nightmare world in contemporary reality. The fiction may not be widely read, but through movies and comics it has created ...
