Friday, November 1, 2013

Five books that predicted the internet

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Joel Cunningham tagged five books that predicted the internet, including:
Neuromancer, by William Gibson (1984): Considering it’s the novel that popularized the phrase “cyberspace,” I can hardly leave Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk masterpiece off the list. His vision of a virtual world linking the databases of every computer in the world, while not exactly a literal description of what we currently call the internet, sure feels right: “A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Well, maybe only after you’ve been up all night bouncing between Wikipedia and TV Tropes.
Read about the other entries on the list.


--Marshal Zeringue