Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) opens like George Orwell's 1984 (1949) and of course other books, too, with an establishment of mood, atmosphere, tone, and setting. In Neuromancer, as the protagonist Case enters a bar, the sky is "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." In 1984, on a bright, cold, windy day in April, Winston Smith walks up to his flat where a telescreen is droning its ceaseless streams of information. He looks out the window and sees that "though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything [. . .]." There is in the beginning of both works colorlessness and the imagery of the electronic screen. (1, 2)
There are brandnames in Neuromancer. I remember that from my first and only reading of it many years ago. I thought I had remembered the bartender's arm as having a brandname. Instead there is only a description of it, but that works just as well:
It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.
That sounds like a commercial. Get yours today.
There is a branded place of the future in Neuromancer. It's called Chatsubo. It's a bar, a place for people to gather, drink, and talk. There is also a branded drink, Kirin, which exists in our world of today. There are other brandnames after that. Just keep reading.
In 1984, there is also a branded drink, Victory Gin, a "colourless liquid" that gives off "a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit." (Drinks in these colorless places originate in the Orient. I wonder what that could mean.) Most of the other proper nouns in that story have to do with Big Brother, the organs of the State, and the institutions of slavery, hatred, and oppression. There aren't any choices to be made. You take exactly what's given to you.
Neuromancer takes place in what I guess you could call a capitalistic society. It's no wonder that there would be brandnames and futuristic product placement. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in a monopolistic society. There isn't any need for brandnames, for there is only one of everything and sometimes zero of everything, for there are usually shortages, an identifying feature of socialist economies.
The branded products in Neuromancer are of the imagination, even if they might be real today. The author may have partaken of Kirin, but his purpose in mentioning it isn't to get you to buy it, or to put his own status or knowing or consumer skills on display. It is instead literary or artistic. It has nothing to do with himself. If he has seen nine billion commercials in a lifetime of watching TV, he isn't letting us know that. It's clear that commercialism and consumerism haven't gotten into his brain.
In contrast, brandnames and product placement are everywhere today, in people's everyday language and perhaps most annoyingly in their fiction-writing and storytelling. People that you meet will even show you on their branded phones pictures of the branded products they have consumed, and they will tell you the brandnames of the places where they purchased those branded products.
The use of brandnames in Neuromancer doesn't serve the same purpose as in genre fiction of today, which is, truth be told, wholly consumeristic and commercialistic. Genre writers, for example those in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023), seem unaware that their brains have been taken over by large corporations and that they are offering free advertising for the various brands they have placed in their stories. They have been the watchers of nine billion commercials in which the nine billion names of products have been catalogued, and they can't or won't turn off their TV brains long enough to write, simply, a story. They just have to include their favorite brandnames in their prose. If I can stretch that metaphor past the breaking point, although their televisions have never been "tuned to a dead channel," their thoughts are as dull as the Neuromancer sky and as colorless as Victory Gin. I want to tell them: physical objects are not characters. They don't need names. They do not take action. They are inert. We as readers do not take any interest in them. And yet contemporary authors expect that brandnames will offer color and carry the weight of description, or even the weight of the story for them, completely oblivious to the fact that brandnames are not up to the task. And these are professional writers.
Science fiction has as one of its purposes satire. Dystopian fiction is very often satirical, even when it is grim. Nineteen Eighty-Four is both grim and bitterly satirical. Neuromancer can be seen as satirical, too, though slightly less grim. At the end of April this year, at around the time the clock struck nineteen, we gathered in a bar for our monthly weird fiction/science fiction bookclub. (The bartender there does not have a prosthetic arm.) This April we read stories by J.G. Ballard, an author associated with the British New Wave. One of the stories we read is "The Subliminal Man," originally in New Worlds Science Fiction in January 1963. "The Subliminal Man" is about advertising and marketing, moreover about mindless and inexhaustible consumption. It's a funny, pointed, and utterly accurate story about the future, i.e., our present. For example, in the story, so many boxes arrive so rapidly at the protagonist's house that he and his wife don't even know what's in them. They sit unopened as more boxes arrive. Consider that in your own life. As you have been reading this, there have probably been more boxes arriving on your doorstep. You'd better fetch them soon so that there's enough room for the next box to arrive.
By the way, as we were discussing "The Subliminal Man," a song came on the stereo. It was "Thieves Like Us" by New Order. We did not request it. We were talking about a New Wave author and a New Wave song simply played and came into our ears. These are the things that happen in this world of circles and webs, of nexuses, matrixes, and connections, of serendipity and coincidences. Or maybe it's planning. By the way again, the words cyberspace and matrix show up in the first few pages of Neuromancer.
The point of this is that product placement and the use of brandnames in contemporary fiction is not satirical, nor is it ironic. It is in fact completely unironic, for its authors seem completely unaware that they have allowed their brains to be taken over by consumerism and commercialism. They have programmed themselves to be this way--programmed in the computer sense rather than in the TV sense. Having programmed themselves, they have made themselves unselfconscious, just as machines are unselfconscious. They have become robotic instruments of the corporations that produce and sell branded products. In short, they have ceased to think and should probably not be considered true artists or even hack writers or the authors of potboilers, for even hacks are self-aware. (It's one of the things that turns them to drink.) This is among the worst kinds of writing because it's completely unthinking and at the same time very apparently in earnest. These writers won't change their ways because they simply can't. They don't know that they're committing an offense, and they lack the ability to do anything differently. If you were to tell them that they have to change, they would probably start crying. Either that or they would lash out. This is not a good situation. What does it bode for the future of writing?
* * *
George Orwell completed work on 1984 in 1948, the year in which William Gibson was born. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in 1984, the year in which Mr. Gibson's Neuromancer was published. I didn't intend to write about him exactly today, but June 25, 2026, is the 123rd birthday of George Orwell, or, as he was christened, Eric Arthur Blair. Happy Birthday to him, one of the essential authors of the twentieth century.
Notes
(1) In the TV series The Big Bang Theory, the elevator doesn't work, just as in 1984. Winston Smith doesn't have a Penny across the hall, but he has his Julia. Penny saves. Julia tries but fails. Rats!
(2) Television was the name of a pre-punk or sort-of punk band from New York City. Their first album was released in 1977, or Year One of the punk calendar.
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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