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A review by davybaby
Neuromancer by William Gibson
3.0
A game I play sometimes with friends is cleverly titled, "The Book Game." We read the jacket copy of various books aloud, then come up with our own first lines for them. My wife's opening line for Neuromancer: "I didn't always want to be an internet cowboy."
The silliness of that false first line captures what turned me off about both Neuromancer and its colleague in cyberpunk influence, [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385214698s/830.jpg|493634]. They both have major aspects of the plot that seem so saturday-morning-cartoon silly that it’s hard to take them seriously. Snow Crash's world is traversed by couriers who grapple onto hover cars with their hover boards and X-game around. Case, the "internet cowboy" protagonist of Neuromancer, drifts out of a drug-fugue to perform heists and begin an implausible affair with a bug-eyed "street samurai." Cyberpunk, in my experience, is as much defined by its unabashed teenage wish-fulfillment as anything more cerebral.
If you’re interested in a more cerebral breakdown of cyberpunk, Here is a blog post that excellently breaks down both the sub-genre and its relation to Blade Runner. If you’re not familiar, Blade Runner is probably the most famous non-book example of cyberpunk.
Neuromancer is famous for exploring cyberspace (a term coined by Gibson) in a tactile and atmospheric way. As explained by Gibson, he took a romantic and open view of the internet specifically because of his ignorance:
“It wasn’t until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there’s a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I’d been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.”
– William Gibson
His romantic view is very interesting. It’s definitely more about atmosphere than accuracy, and Gibson’s descriptions are tactile and dreamlike: “Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace… The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell—“
Atmospheric and intriguing, Neuromancer is interesting as influential literature, but I wouldn’t expect too much of the story itself.
I’ll close with this passage that’s a beautifully-written commentary on American culture. The rampant consumerism, the continents of stuff drifting through our lives:
“They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but they seemed to blur back into the mass… An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn’t look back.”
The silliness of that false first line captures what turned me off about both Neuromancer and its colleague in cyberpunk influence, [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385214698s/830.jpg|493634]. They both have major aspects of the plot that seem so saturday-morning-cartoon silly that it’s hard to take them seriously. Snow Crash's world is traversed by couriers who grapple onto hover cars with their hover boards and X-game around. Case, the "internet cowboy" protagonist of Neuromancer, drifts out of a drug-fugue to perform heists and begin an implausible affair with a bug-eyed "street samurai." Cyberpunk, in my experience, is as much defined by its unabashed teenage wish-fulfillment as anything more cerebral.
If you’re interested in a more cerebral breakdown of cyberpunk, Here is a blog post that excellently breaks down both the sub-genre and its relation to Blade Runner. If you’re not familiar, Blade Runner is probably the most famous non-book example of cyberpunk.
Neuromancer is famous for exploring cyberspace (a term coined by Gibson) in a tactile and atmospheric way. As explained by Gibson, he took a romantic and open view of the internet specifically because of his ignorance:
“It wasn’t until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there’s a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I’d been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.”
– William Gibson
His romantic view is very interesting. It’s definitely more about atmosphere than accuracy, and Gibson’s descriptions are tactile and dreamlike: “Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace… The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell—“
Atmospheric and intriguing, Neuromancer is interesting as influential literature, but I wouldn’t expect too much of the story itself.
I’ll close with this passage that’s a beautifully-written commentary on American culture. The rampant consumerism, the continents of stuff drifting through our lives:
“They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but they seemed to blur back into the mass… An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn’t look back.”