Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

a paperback original—that most ephemeral of literary units, a pocket-sized slab of prose meant to fit a standard wire rack, printed on high-acid paper and visibly yearning to return to the crude pulp from which it had been pressed.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.

Yet even those at least partially in the know about science fiction (if nothing more) who debated, defended, or denigrated Gibson didn’t have the faintest idea of what Gibson was actually doing. (Though he didn’t either, at least not at the time—no writer knows what he or she has actually created until the book is actually read by others.)

Cyberspace was born where the laurel grows lush and verdant; where the dogwoods blossom and the whippoorwills cry in the wind-whipped limbs of the tulip trees. It was born between the ridges, deep in the glades where streams rush cold along their limestone courses; born high on the mountainsides not yet strip-mined for their coal, atop the lone green knobs of Mars. The Southern Highlands, this region was once called; we now call it Appalachia. This part of the United States has been since the Revolution (and even now, to some degree remains) not merely rural, but distant, in time as well as place; its light filters down through the branches from another world’s sun.

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

I’d rather be in some dark holler where the sun don’t never shine.