Book: Neuromancer

[liv]

Author: William Gibson

Details: (c) William Gibson 1984; Pub Voyager 2000; ISBN 0-586-05545-4

Verdict: Neuromancer is exciting and original.

Reasons for reading it: It's something of a classic and I was curious to know about the foundation of the cyberpunk genre.

How it came into my hands: Library

I very much enjoyed Neuromancer. It's a really exciting story, with characters I cared about even if they are very strange and not at all like me, and plenty of action and plot twists. I enjoyed the prose, though I can see why some might find it irritating. In some ways it's very traditional SF with lots of cool ideas, and enough technobabble to give an impression of a futuristic society but without much in the way of detailed world-building.

It's surprisingly undated for a near-future piece written in the 80s; there's one breathless line about "hundreds of megabytes of RAM" but in general it could easily be contemporary. That might be partly because a lot of newer books are directly influenced by it, admittedly. Its concerns are things like AIs achieving sentience and something that actually looks like a better projection of the future internet than many portrayals created by people who actually have the current internet to extrapolate from. Also lots of philosophy about what it is to be human and transhuman, with cyrogenics and uploading and that sort of thing. But it manages to avoid having the characters actually philosophize at you; the protagonist, Case, is not at all a reflective type, and the story moves along with plenty of pace, leaving the reader to make their own inferences.

It's very gory and violent, though there is a sense of detachment from that nastiness because it's presented as part of the general whizz-bang thriller dramatic scenery. Also there were some elements of the plot I didn't entirely understand; sometimes I had a slight suspicion that there wasn't much substance behind the flashy prose. Then again, it's one of those books that I read too fast because the plot was so exciting and I wanted to know what would happen next. I may come back to it at some point.

So yes, I can very much see where the hype comes from and why there are so many imitators. I know Gibson is fairly prolific; what, if anything, should I read of the rest of his oeuvre?

Comments

[403]

I liked All Tomorrow's Parties; you might, too.

[liv]

Thanks for the rec!

[st_aurafina]

I really enjoyed the whole of the Sprawl trilogy - Neuromancer is the first.

It's surprisingly undated for a near-future piece written in the 80s; there's one breathless line about "hundreds of megabytes of RAM" but in general it could easily be contemporary.

I love how he looked into the future and saw how integrated we'd be with online communication - even if we're not zooming around cyberspace, we're always connected in one way or another. He really caught the atmosphere of it - how adaptable and user-driven it would be.

[liv]

I didn't realize it was part of a trilogy, else I might have been less keen to try it! Oh well, no harm done. But yes, the atmosphere of cyberspace and interconnectedness is just what makes the book work.

[st_aurafina]

Well, it's a loosely themed trilogy, really. The books stand alone very well too. But I'm always a sucker for different views of one world, and that's what was best about The Sprawl series.

[liv]

I like loosely themed sets of books that give different views of the same world, so this makes me more enthusiastic than if it were a tight trilogy!

Also, I forgot to say, I really like your icon :-)

[wychwood]

You will probably like Burning Chrome better than I did, and it's certainly an interesting collection of stories (including some that stand alone but fit within the worlds / backstories of his novels). With the rest of his more cyberpunky stuff, the other Sprawl books are ok, and I quite liked the Bridge Trilogy, which (IIRC) was similarly loosely linked, and much the same kind of feel. He's not actually that prolific; nine novels and a short-story collection.

The one that I really love is Pattern Recognition, though. It's very different from Neuromancer, but in some ways it engages with similar themes. It was published in 2003, and slipstream-y rather than SFF; it's much more mature (and less gory), but I am persistently fascinated by the topics he deals with - marketing and branding and the myriad modern ways we use the Internet and the internationalism it supports.

[lab]

I second the rec of Burning Chrome, I love his short work more than the rest, and Pattern Recognition had me floored when I first read it. (Also hi, I still owe you a ton of books, could you PM me an address I can send them too - my life has been really, really ~special~ these past few months and I'm awfully sorry that I haven't sent them yet. :(

[liv]

Ooh, yay, you're still alive! I hope you're doing ok in general.

I was moving and offline at about the same time you got buried under real life stuff, so I thought the rest of the books were never going to happen. It would be totally wonderful to start again with that, because I got so much pleasure out of receiving your book parcels! If I remember right, we were up to March, so you could start again with April, and do May, June, July and a double set for August, and that would complete what I bought at the auction. Is that fair? PM on its way to you...

[liv]

Ooh, helpful comments, thank you. I will definitely look out for Pattern Recognition. Similar themes to Neuromancer but less gory sounds very appealing to me.

[coalescent]

Yes, I would echo the recommendation for Pattern Recognition (although Spook Country was a disappointment).

[rysmiel]

William Gibson does seem to have made a long and successful career out of writing books set in more or less the same point, in some ways, but from an angle such that in the 1980s they were bleeding-edge science fiction, in the 1990s they were day-after-tomorrow thrillers, and his most recent couple of books feel very oddly early-2000s retro. I couldn't say I love any of them; there's something in the degree of distanced he is from his characters that does not quite work for me. But as a verbal stylist he's getting better and better, and I'd certainly recommend Pattern Recognition and Spook Country on those grounds.

[liv]

Hmm, that's a really interesting point about distance from the characters. I thought Neuromancer was doing quite well at that sympathetic yet not likeable thing that I really enjoy when it's done well. I did enjoy what Gibson does with language, though, so that sounds like a very positive rec for some of his more recent stuff.