TV tuned to a dead channel

The opening line of William Gibson's novel Neuromancer is famous:

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

When I read this line, I knew immediately what he meant, and thought it was a brilliant line. Later I learned that younger readers didn't know what he was saying.

My mind went to an old black-and-white television, one that received analog broadcasts, and that displayed snow" when tuned to a channel that had no broadcast signal. Someone whose earliest memories of television are based on digital color broadcast might imagine the sky above the port was solid blue rather than crackly gray.

Gibson discusses how his book has aged in a preface to a recent edition. He says that science fiction that is too prescient would be received poorly.

Imagine a novel from the sixties whose author had somehow fully envisioned cellular telephony circa 2004, and had worked it, exactly as we know it today, into the fabric of her imaginary future. Such a book would have seemed highly peculiar in the sixties ... in ways that would quickly overwhelm the narrative.

He then goes on to say

I suspect that Neuromancer owes much of its shelf life to my almost perfect ignorance of the technology I was extrapolating from. ... Where I made things up from whole cloth, the colors remain bright.

I find it odd that many judge a work of science fiction by what it got right." I don't read science fiction as a forecast; read it to enjoy a story. I don't need a book to be prescient, but until reading Gibson's remarks it hadn't occurred to me that fiction that is too prescient might not be enjoyable fiction, at least for its first readers.

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