William Gibson
Neuromante

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel".

The phrase that opens "Neuromancer" has gone down in history as one of the most famous in science fiction literature of all time. And by "science fiction" I don't mean that adventurous genre full of special effects to which the billion-dollar productions of Hollywood have accustomed us, but that literary genre of historical and social investigation that already in the '50s took its first steps with the famous anti-utopias of Orwell, Huxley, and the others we all know.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this novel is that it seems to have been written yesterday, when in fact it was written in 1984. At a time when the Commodore 64 had just been launched on the market, Gibson invented words like "hacker," "network," "cyberspace," literally ahead of his time.

His intention was to describe the world towards which humanity was heading, and it is frightening to note that twenty-five years after the first edition of "Neuromancer," at least half of his predictions prove correct (two above all: the existence of a great universal computer network and the increasing globalization that sweeps away cultural differences).

The other half, the tragic, frightening social, economic, and human evolution towards a world in which the principle of economic profit is the only law, beyond good and evil, where market logic forces a mercenary life at the cost of one's own survival, where individualism transcends schizophrenia, and the concept of crime is naturally integrated into everyday life, is a very plausible step in the evolution of what happens before our eyes every day.

This is what is disturbing, its clarity in imagining future history.

Unlike the anti-utopias of Orwell and company, here we do not find any authoritarian state, no police to round up dissidents and maintain order, but the scenario is even worse: there is no order except that of the great global interests that self-legitimize. The world is commanded by multinationals where military powers and industrial capital merge into omnipotent entities capable of imposing their law by any means. A violent anarchy reigns in which the voice of power is asserted through hitmen and organized crime in the pay of large corporations.

Technology is the most degenerate aspect of this world, the relationship that men have with it has transcended every concept of interaction: now technology is an integral part of the organism of every human being. Everyone has at least one bionic implant in their body to extend their physical or psychic abilities. We are beyond the idea of alienation, we are at the total dismemberment of the individual, who becomes simply an assembly of pieces that can be changed, removed, enhanced as needed. Man in his natural form is now obsolete, unsuitable.

If you add that the characters responsible for moving the events and protagonists decisively in the story are an artificial intelligence and a flatline (i.e., an electronic device into which the intelligence and personality of a now deceased person have been inserted), who act to free their existence from the physical structures in which they are confined, we understand the atrocious truth: it is technology that disposes of man and his life, and not the reverse. It is the beings with artificial intelligence that assert their superiority over a man reduced to an inert and non-functional object. While they find the path to freedom, the transcendence from their physical dimension, man is increasingly a slave and increasingly a prisoner of reality, of his structural, mental, biological limits.

The reversal between human and anti-human, the thin line between real and artificial life are the dark and poignant themes of this novel. The cold style, austere, aseptic, word by word performs the meticulous demolecularization of everything that exists of human, drains existence of every smallest meaning, even the elementary one of biological animal structure. Life becomes an insignificant variable within a universe dominated by degenerative forces against which man can do nothing but regress on the evolutionary scale in favor of machines, in a peremptory and inexorable process.

I conclude by recommending this masterpiece to everyone, even to those not passionate about the genre. If you read it and are struck by it, you will realize that this story is not an attempt to denounce a possible social regression, however realistic, but the cold assertion that such a future is inevitable, the demolition of all hope of redemption from a certain end already announced and intrinsic to the human world system. Gibson just wants to inform us that the process is already underway, we are falling into it and there is not a single rational reason to think that things will go differently.

Pessimistic, you might say, nihilist. But looking at the course of events with a minimum of realism, could you imagine a future so different?

I, honestly, cannot.