Clarification: NM was set in 2174. Gibson drops a date in his third novel indicating the timing of NM. He later recanted, but the story makes WAY more sense when you put it into such a distant future context, that things have changed so little, socially, and had time to decay despite their best and mostly continuous reinvention efforts over the next two centuries.
Also, did you forget that we've got a chatsubo community here? Feel free to post. I'm the mod. I wouldn't mind discussing writing again, serious writing, and my take on cyberpunk in the twenty-teens. Its like 1911, with laptops and cellphones. Sort of diamond age, only no serious nanotech, no easy answers, just hard ones and drudgery and a lot of things which look the same, only without cars. Lots of italian style scooters to get around. Think Vespa copies, and gravel roads. Road dust, sangria, siestas, sweat and perfume, streetcars, starry nights because there's not enough power grid to waste on streetlights. Part time work, everybody has two jobs. Its different, and kind of the same too. Everything gets more local as the fuel runs out, and taking a trip on a train starts being common again. Retro style cues as well. Bits of Progressivist/Modernist art deco in an ironic sense of what was lost rather than the inevitability it was assumed to be in 1928.
I'm sort of formulating my stories around this setting, percolating ideas, images to use, scenes between characters. Motives, dialog, moments in time. Bright summer afternoons with a straw hat and wayfarers, a hot starched collar, a shiny hip flask, a scooter popping and stinking of rancid cooking oil (diesel 50cc OPOC), telemedicine, and Ground Effect coastal courier flying boats. There's so many potential stories there. Its not dead, just not the same as pictured in 1980. Its not a centralized mayhem of conspiracy and doom. Its not so paranoid. Its living in the chaos of restaurant kitchen, complete with jealous love affairs, soup about to boil over, and the freezer's on the fritz. Its like that.
I have a lot of imagery to work with. My job has been very good for ideas.
If you want to get hyper-techincal: MLO is set exactly 7 years after CZ. CZ takes place 7-8 years after N. So there's a 15 year span across the 3 and I found no references to a 2174 in my copies of MLO.
Personally, I'm pretty sure he originally wrote Neuromancer without a date - or even set of dates - in mind, because as he said it was about the 1980s to begin with.
I did forget about the Chatsubo community here. I'll go find it now. I have some ideas on possible Cyberpunk themes for the now. . .
I know he tried to make sure there were no dates, but he did leave a date in a paper referenced in what I thought was MLO but might have been CZ. Anyway, its there, and the date for NM is 2174. And that's important because it makes sense of the architectural decay of the story and I like that far better than the near future 2030 ideal most people think it refers to. The idea that stuff was built and failed economically and was retasked and sort of did okay for a while then failed and then was retasked again and did okay and maybe got successful and then fell apart and got reworked again... neighborhoods are like that. Oakland is all on the 2nd story because the first floor kept flooding and ended up the basement. Same with Old Town Sacramento. Places adapt to situations, and Venice remains occupied despite the flooding. Think of a place in terms of Venice and its less hard to comprehend.
Not even in the italicized section talking about the boxes, some article the hero looks up for a 5 minute precis?
All that sprawl and domes abandoned and antique furniture lost as dusty junk and gardening robots mostly ignored as uninteresting takes time to accumulate and saturate public consciousness, and then fade into the background hum. I'm going to retain my date regardless. I know I found it in there, but my books are mostly packed away and won't be coming out until October. I'm sure Bill would prefer to use the 2030-2058 dates as you cited them, but there isn't sufficient time for culture and buildings to change to that in so little time passing. Time for a space habitat and common use of transsonic suborbitals for general transportation, for all that crap that costs insane amounts of money to own, for energy to produce and concentrate just for the equivalent of a space club med that would have worked just as well in Grand Cayman.
I reread the trilogy to make sure - no such block of text exists, no such descriptions exist, no references to any hard dates are ever given.
The dates of the novels are also irrelevant to the story contained there in.
The only possible reason to come up with on - and one as specific as yours - is to satisfy your own sense of ego and perception of "truth"
If I were held at gunpoint and forced to come up with a date, I would hazard a guess that the three novels took place over a time frame spanning the 2040-2050s - using imperfect narrators dates of reference as a gauge.
Clarification: NM was set in 2174. Gibson drops a date in his third novel indicating the timing of NM. He later recanted, but the story makes WAY more sense when you put it into such a distant future context, that things have changed so little, socially, and had time to decay despite their best and mostly continuous reinvention efforts over the next two centuries.
Also, did you forget that we've got a chatsubo community here? Feel free to post. I'm the mod. I wouldn't mind discussing writing again, serious writing, and my take on cyberpunk in the twenty-teens. Its like 1911, with laptops and cellphones. Sort of diamond age, only no serious nanotech, no easy answers, just hard ones and drudgery and a lot of things which look the same, only without cars. Lots of italian style scooters to get around. Think Vespa copies, and gravel roads. Road dust, sangria, siestas, sweat and perfume, streetcars, starry nights because there's not enough power grid to waste on streetlights. Part time work, everybody has two jobs. Its different, and kind of the same too. Everything gets more local as the fuel runs out, and taking a trip on a train starts being common again. Retro style cues as well. Bits of Progressivist/Modernist art deco in an ironic sense of what was lost rather than the inevitability it was assumed to be in 1928.
I'm sort of formulating my stories around this setting, percolating ideas, images to use, scenes between characters. Motives, dialog, moments in time. Bright summer afternoons with a straw hat and wayfarers, a hot starched collar, a shiny hip flask, a scooter popping and stinking of rancid cooking oil (diesel 50cc OPOC), telemedicine, and Ground Effect coastal courier flying boats. There's so many potential stories there. Its not dead, just not the same as pictured in 1980. Its not a centralized mayhem of conspiracy and doom. Its not so paranoid. Its living in the chaos of restaurant kitchen, complete with jealous love affairs, soup about to boil over, and the freezer's on the fritz. Its like that.
I have a lot of imagery to work with. My job has been very good for ideas.
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Personally, I'm pretty sure he originally wrote Neuromancer without a date - or even set of dates - in mind, because as he said it was about the 1980s to begin with.
I did forget about the Chatsubo community here. I'll go find it now. I have some ideas on possible Cyberpunk themes for the now. . .
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(and there's no date reference anywhere in CZ either. FWIW the computer game states 2058.)
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All that sprawl and domes abandoned and antique furniture lost as dusty junk and gardening robots mostly ignored as uninteresting takes time to accumulate and saturate public consciousness, and then fade into the background hum. I'm going to retain my date regardless. I know I found it in there, but my books are mostly packed away and won't be coming out until October. I'm sure Bill would prefer to use the 2030-2058 dates as you cited them, but there isn't sufficient time for culture and buildings to change to that in so little time passing. Time for a space habitat and common use of transsonic suborbitals for general transportation, for all that crap that costs insane amounts of money to own, for energy to produce and concentrate just for the equivalent of a space club med that would have worked just as well in Grand Cayman.
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The dates of the novels are also irrelevant to the story contained there in.
The only possible reason to come up with on - and one as specific as yours - is to satisfy your own sense of ego and perception of "truth"
If I were held at gunpoint and forced to come up with a date, I would hazard a guess that the three novels took place over a time frame spanning the 2040-2050s - using imperfect narrators dates of reference as a gauge.
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