This blog post is a non-spoiler review of the short story Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson. For the Master Post of Johnny Mnemonic see here.

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Johnny Mnemonic is a foundational classic of cyberpunk and indeed all of science fiction. Delete the cheesy 90s movie version from your brain. Johnny Mnemonic isn’t about some hero saving the world, like a thousand Marvel movies. It is a complex and rich story told with astonishing economy and density of detail. It’s a marvelous, visionary piece of writing that created the cyberpunk genre as we know it.

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Most of the basic signifiers are there: high tech and low life, the mixing of human flesh and cybernetics, corporate assassins, drug use (either actual drug use or “cyberspace” as a drug-like mass hallucination). The only thing it misses is the racial mixing – what I call racial deregulation that comes up in New Rose Hotel that I talk about here. But everything else is right there on just a couple of dozen pages.

Plot

Our hero Johnny Mnemonic is a data courier. He has had silicon and cyberware installed in his head so he can carry data and charge high data storage fees. Some data has been stored in his head and he wants to download the data and get paid. But his boss/fence doesn’t want to meet with him because the data in Johnny’s head is stolen from the wrong corporation. So his boss/fence wants to kill him.

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Johnny decides to meet the boss under a fake name and hash out a deal. The meeting doesn’t go as planned when a mysterious woman shows up. It is the famous Molly Millions with mirror glasses for eyes and razors coming out of her fingertips who is also at the heart of Neuromancer.

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The second half of the story is devoted to hiding out from corporate assassins while trying to hack the password to Johnny’s storage in his brain. The second half also contains an interesting meditation on tech as a drug, especially what exactly all those people who have gotten surgical enhancements like Johnny and Molly are doing to themselves and their bodies and their humanity. Strong Black Mirror vibes, which are common in the cyberpunk genre, but which I think a number people overlook because a lot of people still like to “geewhiz” at the “cool” tech.

Style

The style is worth commenting on because Gibson is certainly known as a stylist and is seen as someone who is both a genre writer and a literary writer. This was the second piece of fiction he ever attempted, so his style is not fully developed, and you don’t really get the whole Gibson experience that you see in Neuromancer. Instead, this reads like a techno infused version of Robert Howard, with the story’s fast pace and straight-ahead plot.

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I like the prose here. I strongly prefer it to the “look ‘ma, I’m a writer” prose that you would see a few years later in Neuromancer and New Rose Hotel, with its sky the color of tv and all that.

Verdict

Johnny Mnemonic is a must read whether you are a fan of cyberpunk, science fiction, or just fiction. This is where the cyberpunk genre – the last genuine movement in science fiction – began. It serves as more than a prequel to its more famous cousin, Neuromancer. It is a truly visionary statement that stands the test of time and rewards repeated readings of its richly detailed world and characters.

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In further blog posts, I plan to delve into Johnny Mnemonic’s borderless world, the politics and economics behind that world, and the drug use and the tech abuse in that are a consequence of living in a world where all borders have been broken down.