4 ms·

I just finished the audiobook of Neuromancer a week ago, and I didn't really enjoy it. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it. I love oth

I just finished the audiobook of Neuromancer a week ago, and I didn't really enjoy it. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it. I love other what I think of as similar books like Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I had high hopes for Neuromancer, which maybe that was part of it, but I just didn't enjoy it. It kind of turned into a slog and I nearly gave up at around 90%, but just pushed through because I was so close. Is it just me?

overcast 8y ago
It's not just you, I read it about a year ago after all these years of hearing its praises. Clearly it was pioneering work that influenced many science fiction movies/books/games, but it was an atrocious read. There isn't many books where I've had to force myself to as you put it, slog my way to the end. I also thought Snowcrash was awful though, with that terrible third person narrative and amateur writing style.
snovv_crash 8y ago
Agreed - although visionary, Gibson's writing was not yet mature. I find his more recent Blue Ant series much more enjoyable, and while less technologically visionary, more insightful into human nature and interactions.
larrydag 8y ago
I found it a very hard read and a very disjointed plot. The literary color in the book is really good as described already.
Analemma_ 8y ago
I think Neuromancer has suffered a lot from what TVTropes calls the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" problem: successive works have borrowed from it so completely that it's difficult to read the book now and get the same effect as when it was published, because it feels so full of cyberpunk cliches. But don't forget that pretty much all those cliches originated here and were totally new at the time.
- eropple 8y ago
  In terms of milieu and ideas, definitely. But Gibson's plots clank along in pretty much every novel-length work of his I've read. It's a problem of mechanics and storytelling at that point, I think.
atombender 8y ago
I read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around. For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all. I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.) To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.
- eropple 8y ago
hd4 8y ago
No, I really was put off by the low quality and the dumb accents that Gibson did (which I'm guessing is the version you listened to). Just checked the wiki and supposedly there are two other versions out there which I guess I'll have to find now.

overcast 8y ago

It's not just you, I read it about a year ago after all these years of hearing its praises. Clearly it was pioneering work that influenced many science fiction movies/books/games, but it was an atrocious read. There isn't many books where I've had to force myself to as you put it, slog my way to the end. I also thought Snowcrash was awful though, with that terrible third person narrative and amateur writing style.

snovv_crash 8y ago

Agreed - although visionary, Gibson's writing was not yet mature. I find his more recent Blue Ant series much more enjoyable, and while less technologically visionary, more insightful into human nature and interactions.

larrydag 8y ago

I found it a very hard read and a very disjointed plot. The literary color in the book is really good as described already.

Analemma_ 8y ago

I think Neuromancer has suffered a lot from what TVTropes calls the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" problem: successive works have borrowed from it so completely that it's difficult to read the book now and get the same effect as when it was published, because it feels so full of cyberpunk cliches. But don't forget that pretty much all those cliches originated here and were totally new at the time.

eropple 8y ago
In terms of milieu and ideas, definitely. But Gibson's plots clank along in pretty much every novel-length work of his I've read. It's a problem of mechanics and storytelling at that point, I think.

atombender 8y ago

I read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around. For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all. I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.) To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.

eropple 8y ago

hd4 8y ago

No, I really was put off by the low quality and the dumb accents that Gibson did (which I'm guessing is the version you listened to). Just checked the wiki and supposedly there are two other versions out there which I guess I'll have to find now.