A Few Weeks in the Matrix

In which The Author goes back to the Source

I recently landed the biggest proofreading job so far. Gollancz are reissuing William Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels – Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – together with his collection of short stories Burning Chrome. Guess who got the gig to do all four?

It's been exciting for me, because they want these to be the definitive editions, and so I've been entrusted to bash a degree of consistency into the books. It's understandable, I suppose, because they came out at different times, and were presumably copy-edited by different people. I've been making long lists of charactes, product manufacturers (real and fictional), locations (real and fictional), and futuristic slang words, technical terms and foreign words, in order to apply the changes across the board.

It's been a fairly long time since I read Neuromancer, and I've never tackled the sequels before. As a result, I hadn't noticed just what a heavy influence Mr Gibson has been on the mainstream of science fiction over the past twenty years or so. I suppose the most obvious nod to his books was one of my favourite films of all times, The Matrix.

While the idea of plugging into a 'virtual reality' system anticipates Neuromancer by a few years – I've traced it back as far as Christopher Priest's novel A Dream of Wessex – it was the Wachowski Brothers who really brought the idea to a mass audience. While Mr Gibson uses the term 'the matrix' (with a lower case m) to describe the cyberspace world his characters explore, I think his vision of the internet owes more to the embarrassing graphics of Lawnmower Man than to our everyday experiences of surfing the Net. However, the character of the Finn, an AI construct who acts as an intermediary between the human protagonists and the sentient programs inhabiting the matrix, was a direct steal as the Oracle. (In Mona Lisa Overdrive the Finn even refers to himself as 'an oracle.') While the films owe a conceptual debt to Mr Gibson's books, the two media are worlds apart.

No, what I've got in mind is the subtle way in which Mr Gibson's ideas have spread into popular SF films and TV programmes over the years. Take Minority Report, for example. That's another great film based on a very short story by one of the Grand Masters of the genre, Philip K. Dick. You might not have noticed it unless you were looking, but the rundown areas of Washington DC are referred to at one point as 'the sprawl'. That's straight out of Neuromancer – as are the little mechanical spiders which the police use to search the building in which John Anderton is hiding.

Those same little spiders turned up again in the second episode of the revived Doctor Who, of all places. And it's though Doctor Who, perhaps surprisingly, that many of Mr Gibson's ideas have made it onto the small screen. In the two-parter 'Silence in the Library'/Forests of the Dead', Steven Moffat introduced the idea of an electronic interface which could record a person's consciousness for a short time. At the end of the second episode, all the characters who've been killed by the Vashta Nerada, and River Song, who sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, are reunited in a virtual world. That's a nod to Neuromancer, where the stored consciousness of a dead hacker known as the Dixie Flatline helps our hero crack the biggest encryption job of all time. In 'Time Heist', in the most recent series, one of the characters is an augmented human, who can plug hardware into a socket behind his ear. That's straight out of the Sprawl books as well.

Although they're some three decades old, and Mr Gibson has left the Sprawl behind to write more complex but less technologically biased books, his legacy in modern SF is huge and widespread. Read the books for yourself when they're reissued, and see how many winks to his ideas you can spot next time you're watching a film or enjoying the Doctor's latest adventures.

Several years ago, I became famous in the pub for remembering huge amounts of trivia which I could recall at a moment's notice. I used to tease my pals that I was going to start charging them for storing facts in my brain. That, of course, is the basic plot of 'Johnny Mnemonic' – later made into a rather disappointing but very stylish film with Keanu Reeves. And that's the reason I'm writing this today. The first story in Burning Chrome is, of course, 'Johnny Mnemonic'. Even though I had the book in front of me when I was working on the proof, the Voyager edition isn't without its production errors.

So, like Neo in The Matrix: Reloaded, I had to go back to the Source. If you've read my blog 'OmniScience' from a few years ago, you'll know that I was regularly reading this cutting-edge magazine of science fact, fiction and fantasy around the time that I was studying for my O levels, back in the very early 1980s.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I can now reveal the Source, as it was was revealed to me when I was about fifteen, and didn't have a fucking clue what was going on in the story at the time. Thirty-five years on, I still can't quite believe that I'm working on the reissue. When I wrote to Gollancz and told them I'd been a SF fan for most of my life, I don't think they believed me. Well, here's the proof (no pun intended!)