The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

It is the opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. There are few lines that have set the ambience of a scene so efficiently, and in so few words. I really can’t put my finger on why, maybe it is because days with skies befitting that description often come with a certain mood.

Milgrim doubted that Brown was comforted by Gray’s Papaya, but he could become relatively talkative there. He’d have the non-alcoholic piña colada with his franks and lay out the origins of cultural Marxism in America. Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old school American academia. Brown always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi creepiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy monochrome Euro-commie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks.

When I browsed through the archives I found a few more excerpts posted between January and March that seem to be related. Whatever it is about, Gibson’s next novel is at the top of my “anticipated literature” list.