William Gibson

Aside from Blade Runner, the other major cyberpunk influence on me was Johnny Mnemonic; yes, the 1995 movie starring Keanu Reeves, Takeshi Kitano, Dolph Lundgren, and Ice-T. Despite the fact that Gibson himself wrote the screenplay for this movie that was already based on his own work, the movie Johnny Mnemonic was a general crap-fest of some major proportion. The acting on pretty much everyone's part was horrible, the special effects were -very- low budget (and I cannot stress the "very" part for some of those scenes), and the story was just really hard to swallow sometimes, even for sci-fi.

However, in spite of all these things, I love that movie. Ignoring the acting, the concepts, the atmosphere, and the world Gibson created here are undeniably pure cyberpunk. It would be relatively easy to take that universe and apply a million other viable stories to it. Johnny Mnemonic Furthered my hunger for more and more cyberpunk; a hunger that has yet to be satisfied. The short story Gibson wrote of the same name, is definitely better than Keanu Reeves' acting on just about every level. The story itself had the same general feel, but definitely expressed it much more easily and with less forced emotion than the film. There were differences, of course, but good ones. So if you've seen the movie, but haven't read the story, I highly recommend it.

Johnny Mnemonic is the story of Johnny, a cybernetic data-jockey who is being hunted by the Yakuza for the data he currently has concealed in his head. All the while haunted by flashes of lost memories from the removal of his long-term memory to make room for data storage. An unintentional overload of data spells death for Johnny in only a matter of days unless he can get the data out without getting killed by the Yakuza first. If you can stomach the acting in lieu of a good cyberpunk story by one of the masters of the genre, I sincerely suggest giving Johnny Mnemonic a try. Though, if you haven't read the short story yet, I suggest reading it -after- the movie. That way it can only get better!