Mona Lisa Overdrive

Author's Foreword

Ten years have now passed since the inception of whatever strange process it was that led me to write Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The technology through which you now access these words didn't exist, a decade ago.

Neuromancer was written on a "clockwork typewriter," the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane's office in Chiba City. This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930's. It's a very tough and elegant piece of work, from the factory of E. PAILLARD & Cie S.A. YVERDON (SUISSE). Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green-and-black "crackle" paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant's ledger. Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.) In its day, the Hermes 2000 was one of the best portable writing-machines in the world, and one of the most expensive. This one belonged to my wife's step-grandfather, who had been a journalist of sorts and had used it to compose laudatory essays on the poetry of Robert Burns. I used it first to write undergraduate Eng. lit. papers, then my early attempts at short stories, then Neuromancer, all without so much as ever having touched an actual computer.

Some readers, evidently, find this odd. I don't. Computers, in 1981 (when I began to work with the concept of cyberspace, the word having first seen light on my trusty Hermes) were mostly wall-sized monsters covered with twirling wheels of magnetic tape. I'd once glimpsed one through a window at the university. Friends who did things with computers tended to do them at very odd hours, having arranged to scam time on some large institution's mainframe.

Around that time, however, the Apple IIc appeared. For me, it appeared on the miniature billboards affixed to bus-stop shelters. This seductive little unit, looking not that much bigger, really, than your present day Powerbook, was depicted dangling from a handle in the hand of some unseen suit with a nicely-laundered cuff. Portability! Amazing! A whole computer in a package that size! (I didn't know that you had to lug the monitor around as well, plus a bulky little transformer and another disk-drive that weighed nearly as much as the computer itself.) These Apple ads were the direct inspiration for the cyberspace decks in Neuromancer. Like the Hermes 2000, the IIc, in its day, was quite something.

Not that I ever experienced it in its day, not quite. My Hermes died. Some tiny pawl or widget caved in to metal-fatigue. No replacement could be found. I'd just started Count Zero. I gave the typewriter man $75 for a reconditioned Royal desk machine, a hideous truck-like lump of a thing with an extended carriage that alone weighed twenty pounds. It had an extended carriage, he said, because it had belonged to a little old lady who'd only ever used it to type mimeograph stencils for Sunday-school programs. (Though I suspect many of you may not know what "mimeograph stencils" were.)

I stuck with this ghastly clunker through Count Zero, but as it came time to begin Mona Lisa Overdrive, I went shopping for a computer. Bruce Sterling's father had given him his old Apple II, and Bruce allowed as how it was a pretty convenient way to put words in a row. Remembering those bus-stop ads, I bought myself an Apple IIc. This was around 1986 or so, and the IIc had long-since been eclipsed by various proto-Macs, which everyone assured me were wonderful, but which I regarded as prohibitively expensive. I bought a IIc in an end-of-line sale at a department store, took it home, and learned, to my considerable disappointment, that personal computers stored their data on little circular bits of electromagnetic tape, which were whirled around to the accompaniment of assorted coarse sounds. I suppose I'd assumed the data was just sort of, well, held. In a glittering mesh of silicon. Or something. But silently.

And that, quite literally, was the first time I ever touched a computer. And I still don't know very much about them. The revealed truth of which, as I've said, sometimes perturbs my readers, or in any case those readers with a peculiarly intense computer-tech bent, of whom I seem to have more than a few.

But Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer. Perhaps it all goes to prove that there are situations (literary ones, at least) in which a little knowledge is not only a dangerous thing, but the best tool for the job at hand.

A mimeograph stencil, by the way, is a piece of tissue-paper impregnated with wax. You punch through the wax with a typewriter, creating a stencil through which ink can be forced onto paper, allowing the reproduction of multiple copies. For many years, and not so long ago, these curious devices were very nearly as common as typewriters. They were what people did before laser printers. The mimeograph is one of many dinosaurs recently brought to the verge of extinction by the computer. They are dead tech, destined to make up part of the litter engulfing the Finn's back room. As is my Hermes 2000. As is my Apple IIc, which my children play with only reluctantly, its black-and-white graphics no competition for their video-games. As is my old SE/30 here; as is, eventually, whatever sort of unit, however slick and contemporary, you happen to be reading this on.

It gives me great pleasure to have these three books digitized, data-compressed, and published in this (make no mistake) revolutionary format. We participate, you and I, in the death of print-as-we-knew-it, and should experience thereby an exquisite frisson of ecstasy and dread. So soon, we plunge toward a world in which the word "library" simply means something on the other end of a modem.

But I confess it gives me greater pleasure still, to contemplate that process whereby every tech, however sharp this morning, is invariably supplanted by the new, the unthinkable, and to imagine these words, unread and finally inaccessible, gathering dust at the back of some drawer in some year far up the road. Nothing in there but a tarnished Yale key, a silver dime, a couple of desiccated moths, and several hundred thousand data-compressed words, all in a row.

I know; I put them there.

I'd like to take this opportunity to cite and thank the late Terry Carr, who commissioned the work that became Neuromancer from an unknown and thoroughly unconfident writer, one whose track-record at the time consisted of a handful of short stories. If Terry hadn't been willing to take a chance with me, when he did, thereby forcing me to write something (a novel) I felt several working years short of being ready to do, it's most unlikely that these books would exist today.

-Vancouver, 6/16/92