The lesser-known – now – precursor novel to cyberpunk.

A group of rebels engage in pranks and more serious data exfiltration using hallucinatory interfaces to computer-managed information spaces. If that sounds similar to Neuromancer then that’s because the parallels are unmistakeable. The two books appeared at roughly the same time, and initially True names seems to have been the more famous: certainly it attracted a lot of attention from some serious people in both tech and sci-fi. It’s interesting that Neuromancer emerged over the longer term as the more significant work: and I think that’s deserved, although True names remains a great read.

Both books address the issue of information overload and how it could be combatted by using broader-band neural interfaces rather than screens and keyboards. Gibson envisions a rather architectural metaphor, while Vinge goes for something more mythic and fantastical, a world whose practitioners form “covens” and interact with spells and monsters as a way to bring the available functionality into their limited view. It’s not something that’s actually emerged in what we now think of as cyberspace, which remains resolutely text-driven.

My edition of True names came with essays and an afterward by Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of AI. The essays in the main haven’t aged well, but Minsky’s critique of procedural computing still has some bite.

3/5. Finished Thursday 4 September, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)