Neuromancer
October 9, 2020
I finally finished Neuromancer by William Gibson. It is good, in its way. I have some thoughts.
I don’t have much of anything to say that hasn’t already been said. It seems to invent many of the ideas and tropes that show up in later sci-fi, especially cyberpunk.
The Matrix. The net. Artificial Intelligence. Jacking in. Body modification. Virtual reality. Offworld rastafarians that listen to too much dubstep. Neuromancer has all of these, and then some.
It is also a very difficult book to read. It is short, about 260 pages, but dense. The writing style provides little explanation or context for the world that is described, the book just dropped me into the world and wrote about everything as if I was already familiar with it.
In this way, reading this book is a lot like visiting a foreign country, where very few people speak English. It requires paying attention to context (internal context within the story, not context that is explained) and other clues to decipher the terms, actions, and slang described. That is… good and bad.
I often found myself reading, and realizing that I had no idea what I had just read for the last page, and going back to re-read that section. It required focus. While this focus was difficult to muster, it was worthwhile, because my focus needs the exercise. In a world that seems more and more geared towards distraction, and bite-size spans of attention, it was good to spend time focusing on understanding a single story.
The plot is a permutation of the basic heist plotline. A team is assembled, and a heist is planned and executed. That structure is the bones that the world is built off of. As far as the plot goes, the story is not that good. I was often left scratching my head as to why certain things were done, and the reasonings and motivations of the characters. Thinking back on it, I think it makes sense. In the moment of reading, however, it is hard to decipher that causality of the plot.
The world that this book creates, though, is crazy, in the best of ways. The consential hallucination of the Matrix. Night City. Dixie’s uploaded memory imprint. Molly’s mirror shades. Riviera’s living holograms. The virtual realities created by Wintermute. I mean, the final development of the computer virus that the team uses to perform the final heist is to become a jet that Case flies through cyberspace into the mainframe that they are trying to break into.
As someone that has always appreciated the cyberpunk aesthetic, this book really sung to me. That really seems to be the great thing about this book, how it seems to give birth to so much of what we now know as Cyberpunk. For that alone, it was a very worthwhile read.