Trivia / Sprawl Trilogy

• Referenced by...: Wake borrows the first line of Neuromancer —"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"— with a Technology Marches On twist: "The sky above the island was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel — which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue." Some fans take it further: "The sky over the port was the color of a television set tuned to PBS".
• Technology Marches On:
  • Many modern readers have poked fun at the presence of public payphones in "Neuromancer."
  • And Case's deal in the beginning to sell 3 megabytes of "hot RAM."
  • In a more meta sense, Gibson admits to writing the story on a manual typewriter, just when word processors were coming into wider use.
  • It starts with the very first line. "The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" is beautifully poetic and story-appropriate, if you are considering an analog CRT television. In a strange twist of fate, most modern televisions revert to a bright blue screen when getting no signal, making the line seem to mean the opposite of what was intended.
    • The first sentence of Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere is a shout-out to this very idea:
    The sky was the perfect blue of a television, turned to a dead channel.

---