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Johnny is a "mnemonic courier" who discreetly transports sensitive data for corporations in a storage device implanted in his brain at the cost of his childhood memories. His current job is for a group of scientists in Beijing.
‘Johnny Mnemonic’: plot summary. The story is narrated by a data courier (to whom the story’s title, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, refers). He is able to store vast amounts of sensitive data in his head, thanks to a cybernetic implant, and earns a living by trafficking information for criminal bosses or large corporations.
Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm's most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish.
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- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
"Johnny Mnemonic" was originally published in Omni magazine in 1981, four years after William Gibson first began writing it. That same year, the story was included in The Second Omni Book of Science Fiction; in 1986 it was also included in a collection of Gibson's short stories, titled Burning Chrome (recently available in a 2003 edition). The stor...
William Gibson was born on March 17, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina. His father, William Ford Gibson, worked for a construction company building housing developments throughout the south, and frequently traveled on business. In "Since 1948," an autobiography featured on Gibson's website, Gibson writes that on one such business trip, his father "ch...
As "Johnny Mnemonic" begins, Johnny is preparing for a meeting with Ralfi Face, a fence who deals in stolen high-tech information. Johnny has had his face altered, and his new identity is Eddie Bax, importer. He has heard that Ralfi Face has put out a contract on him, and he wants to find out why. Johnny makes his living by storing clients' sensiti...
"Johnny Mnemonic" was made into a motion picture in 1995, starring Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer, and the rapper Ice-T. Gibson wrote the screenplay. The movie is available on DVD and VHS from Sony Pictu...A "Johnny Mnemonic" computer game was released by Sony Imagesoft in 1995. Players take on the persona of Johnny; the object of the game is to discover a missing download code before being apprehend...Dog
Dog is the first Lo Tek that Johnny meets after climbing into their territory high above Nighttown. With his surgically implanted Doberman canine teeth, missing eye and generally savage appearance, this Dog is a stray, cast aside by the futuristic society of Gibson's story, and left to fend for himself. He and his sentries guard the entrance to the Lo Teks' world, like mongrels guarding a junkyard.
Ralfi Face
Ralfi Face is a fence (he prefers the title "broker") who steals valuable information and then hires Johnny to store it for safekeeping. In Johnny's world, surnames are not handed down but rather chosen; people have names that describe them. For twenty years, Ralfi has worn the face of his idol, "Christian White of the Aryan Reggae Band … final champion of race rock," and this is how he acquired his odd surname. Though mercenary, unscrupulous, and a white supremacist, Ralfi is not normally as...
Jones
Jones is a cybernetic dolphin, surgically altered during the war (exactly what war, and who the combatants were, is never specified) to detect enemy submarines. Jones gets his name from his addiction to heroin ("jones" is slang for heroin addiction). Johnny can relate to Jones, having been altered himself to serve as a courier for information to which he has no conscious access. By the end of the story Jones and Johnny have formed a symbiotic partnership, in which Jones accesses the parts of...
Creating Identity
Characters in literature often struggle with identity crises, but in Gibson's futuristic world they have unusual new ways of defining themselves. For Johnny Mnemonic, a trip to a surgeon for a new face is as mundane as a trip to the salon for a new hairstyle. Ralfi's insistence on wearing the same face for twenty years (though it is someone else's) is considered unusual. Every character in the story has been altered in some way of their own choosing (with the exception of Jones the dolphin, w...
The movie version of "Johnny Mnemonic" was not well-received by critics, although the original story was. After reading the story, watch the movie, and then write your own analysis of the film. Do...Read a story by Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov, both considered more "traditional" science fiction writers than Gibson. How does Gibson's work differ from theirs? Divide a piece of paper into t...Though science fiction deals with the future, it still reflects the mindset of the era in which it was written. Research the 1980s and then make a list of the ways the story reflects that decade, i...Research the life and work of Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domestructures. Given what you learn, do you think it would be feasible to house an entire city in Fuller's domes? What would be th...The Cyberpunk Genre
Two hallmarks of the cyberpunk genre (a subgenre of science fiction) are a dark, pessimistic vision of the future and a writing style that harkens back to the hard-boiled detective novels of Raymond Chandler. Since Gibson is considered the father of cyberpunk, it is not surprising that both these elements appear in "Johnny Mnemonic." Gibson's view of the future is relentlessly dark and ominous, and his style is classic detective fiction: "Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point...
Symbolic Use of Darkness and Light
Gibson describes a dark, unsettling world which is housed inside acrylic geodesic domes. Most of the light is provided by neon arcs; without the arcs, "on a clear day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi." Nighttown is the darkest of all: "The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires." The Lo Teks prefer the darkness, where they can live hidden from the rest of...
Fast Pace
Gibson is known, at least in his earlier works, for maintaining a breakneck pace, rarely stopping to explain. He leaves it up to the reader to define certain terms. In the third paragraph of the story, Gibson writes that "the girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder and harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds." Sony Mao is mentioned again later, but exactly who he is, Gibson never explains. Sometimes, to keep a particular scene m...
Corporate Mergers and Takeovers
The 1980s brought a tide of corporate mergers and takeovers that continued into the 1990s. Many companies in the oil, retail and railroad industries merged in response to industry changes. Deregulation in the airline and telecommunication industries encouraged more mergers and takeovers. The combining of corporations created larger, more powerful corporations with greater market share in their industries. In "Johnny Mnemonic," Johnny speaks often of a corporation called Ono-Sendai, a huge mul...
The Development of the Personal Computer
Gibson began writing "Johnny Mnemonic" in 1977, but didn't finish it until 1981, the year it was published. In Gibson's story, computer technology is everywhere, including within humans themselves. In 1981, however, home computers were still a novelty, though their use was on the rise. The first consumer computers came on the market in the mid-to-late 1970s; some came in the form of kits that had to be assembled by the consumer, and others were so expensive as to be impractical for most peopl...
The Rise of Biotechnology
Scientists Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer discovered recombinant DNA technology in 1973, and went on to develop methods for cloning DNA. In 1976, Boyer founded a biotech company called Genentech, which went public in 1980. As more and more biotech companies were created, public debate over the ethics of genetic cloning escalated; people feared the possible consequences of "tinkering" with the basic building blocks of human life, especially by profit-seeking corporations. In 1980, the U.S. Pa...
1980s: In 1984, only seven percent of American households have personal computers.Today:As of 2003, 61.8 percent of American homes have their own computer.1980s: From 1981 to 1987, the number of cosmetic surgeries performed in the United States doubles. Prior to this time cosmetic surgery was mainly obtained by wealthy older women.Today:The number of...1980s: The Japanese dramatically increase their market share in the automotive and technology industries. This boom leads the Japanese to invest in real estate in the United States; the Mitsubishi..."Johnny Mnemonic" is a science fiction short story by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. It first appeared in Omni magazine in May 1981, [1] and was subsequently included in Burning Chrome , a 1986 collection of Gibson's short fiction.
May 11, 2024 · A 1995 dystopian vision in 2021 of a “mnemonic courier” Johnny (Keanu Reeves) as a data trafficker with an implant that allows storing sensitive data securely when regular computer networks are too dangerous.
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Johnny Mnemonic is a 1995 cyberpunk action film [6] directed by Robert Longo in his feature directorial debut. William Gibson, who wrote the 1981 short story, wrote the screenplay. The film, set in 2021, portrays a dystopian future racked by a tech-induced plague, awash with conspiracies, and dominated by megacorporations and organized crime.
