There aren’t many authors that narrate their own audiobooks, but this is precisely what William Gibson did in 1994. He recorded it on a series of cassette tapes and they were quietly discontinued soon thereafter. The audiobook never got published on CD’s or to the digital realm, which is a crying shame. Today, you can now download them and listen to the recording as the original author intended.
With 1984’s Neuromancer, William Gibson may not have invented cyberpunk, but he certainly crystallized it. The novel exemplifies the tradition’s mandate to bring together “high tech and low life,” or, in the words of Gibson himself, to explore what “any given science-fiction favorite would look like if we could crank up the resolution.” It may have its direct predecessors, but Gibson’s tale of hackers, street samurai, conspiracists, and shadowy artificial intelligences against virtual reality, dystopian urban Japan, and a variety of other international and technological backdrops remains not just archetypal but, unusually for older technology-oriented fiction, exciting. Now you can not only read Gibson’s cyberpunk-defining words, but hear them in Gibson’s voice: a 1994 abridged edition, released only on cassette tapes and now long out of print, resides in MP3 form online here .
| Neuromancer (abridged) read by William Gibson |
|---|
| Tape 1, side 1 |
| Tape 1, side 2 |
| Tape 2, side 1 |
| Tape 2, side 2 |
| Tape 3, side 1 |
| Tape 3, side 2 |
| Tape 4, side 1 |
| Tape 4, side 2 |
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
