I think you’re underestimating how unusual your source culture was in the other direction—it wasn’t just short-lived, it was also new. Prior to the mid 20th Century, there wasn’t a single dominant hegemonic power with an unified intellectual culture centered around a newly consolidated centralized administrative state and media apparatus. Then, shortly after WWII, there was.
There was also a world before the construction of a homogenizing information source (i.e. prior to the internet, broadcast media, the printing press), and that world was also not damaged in the way Neuromancer describes—it wasn’t producing the kind of books you read as a kid. But it contained the raw materials used to construct the world that could write those books.
I think you’re underestimating how unusual your source culture was in the other direction—it wasn’t just short-lived, it was also new. Prior to the mid 20th Century, there wasn’t a single dominant hegemonic power with an unified intellectual culture centered around a newly consolidated centralized administrative state and media apparatus. Then, shortly after WWII, there was.
There was also a world before the construction of a homogenizing information source (i.e. prior to the internet, broadcast media, the printing press), and that world was also not damaged in the way Neuromancer describes—it wasn’t producing the kind of books you read as a kid. But it contained the raw materials used to construct the world that could write those books.