5 ms·
I was sick at home and finally picked up the Neuromancer which had been sitting in the bookshelf for years. It was an experience indeed. At many points, very h
by Gravityloss 5y ago
I was sick at home and finally picked up the Neuromancer which had been sitting in the bookshelf for years.
It was an experience indeed. At many points, very high concept (which of course has been copied to death). At other points, naive. Surprisingly few things felt old fashioned.
The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where everything revolves around the main character.
EDIT: To clarify, I liked the book very much.
- karpierz 5y agoThe protagonist is so addicted to the Internet that he's willing to do literally anything to be able to use it again. If that's not a relatable motivation, I don't know what is.
- ugl 5y agodon't forget the speed addiction!
- idontwantthis 5y agoI think he got addicted to speed so he wouldn’t have to dream about the internet as much
- nirav72 5y agoWe have adderall now. Speed with a PG rating
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI don't think that's a very kind thing to say about the medications for people for who ADHD medications like amphetamines and methylphenidates have meant a huge improvement in quality of life.
- InitialLastName 5y agoThat it has helped people doesn't make the comparison untrue. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that many drugs with reputations of illegitimate/illegal use are readily provided to patients (including children) in a pharmaceutical context, most notably amphetamines and opiates.
- nirav72 5y agoMy point was that plenty of people use adderall without being diagnosed with ADHD.
- samatman 5y agoAdderall is a euphemism for amphetamine the same way that speed is a dysphemism. Hence "speed with a PG rating". I don't think being unkind to molecules is something to worry about, they can't be offended.
- cstross 5y agoThe word "internet" doesn't appear in Neuromancer because in most respects it hadn't been invented yet. While DoD declared TCP/IP the future standard for military networking in 1982, IBM, DEC, and AT&T only adopted TCP/IP in 1984, a couple of months before Neuromancer went on sale. Gibson notoriously wrote it on a manual typewriter circa 1982-83. (It took a year from acceptance to put a novel manuscript into production back then: very often, it still does.) ARPAnet existed in 1982, Public BBSs had been a thing for a while. But the publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence? That was all in his imagination.
- cubano 5y agoThe Source? Compuserve? AOL? Those three come quickly to mind that were certainly trying very hard to be the " publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence" you are speaking of.
- pmoriarty 5y agoAOL didn't exist when Neuromancer was written. While the others did, Gibson seemed not to have been aware of them, and he didn't even own a computer at the time. You can tell his vision of cyberspace came entirely from his imagination because it doesn't even remotely resemble any actual computer systems of the day.
- ethbr0 5y agoEarly cyberpunk tends to be power fantasy wrapped in dystopia. So, Hellblazer with more blinking lights and megacorps instead of demons. And it bears remembering that Gibson was 34 when he wrote Neuromancer. You can see a shift in his characterization by the time he gets to Mona Lisa Overdrive (a book and 4 years later). And certainly with the subsequent Bridge trilogy. IMHO, the Sprawl trilogy that starts with Neuromancer gets better with each book, even though the first is the most famous. Also, plug for Void Star, which I recently finished after a recommendation here. It sits somewhere in Bridge-era Gibson tone, but with the quintessential "What the hell is going on?" Cyberpunk mystery that a lot of retro-CP authors drop. https://www.amazon.com/Void-Star-Novel-Zachary-Mason/dp/1250159415/ https://www.amazon.com/Void-Star-Novel-Zachary-Mason/dp/1250...
- batman-farts 5y agoIt’s definitely worth reading the whole Sprawl trilogy. It establishes something of a pattern in Gibson’s work where characters from the first book in one of his trilogies return in the third, changed. The scene where Molly and the Finn reunite in Mona Lisa Overdrive is quite powerful.
- bpiche 5y agoPersonally I feel like the series only goes downhill with Count Zero and worse with Mona Lisa Overdrive, but they're both fine books. Count Zero does world building well, it's cool to see the BAMA eastern seaboard, but Bobby is not as compelling of a protagonist. If anything the simstim star Tally Isham is a lot more interesting but there's a lot of human trafficking adjacent stuff happening there too. Don't remember Mona Lisa Overdrive very well but the whole A plot with the girl being protected because she has a modem in her head was a bit hard to follow. Though once again great world building. The B plot with an older Molly Millions delivering The Count's cybersarcophagus in the desert was cool af though. edit: that's not to say they're not fine books
- pmoriarty 5y agoI actually much preferred Count Zero to Neuromancer, but Mona Lisa Overdrive was by far the worst of the lot.
- apalmer 5y agoI definitely understand your take, it is definitely an unusual mixture of hard near sci fi concepts and pulp sci fi 'drama'. I personally enjoyed it immensely but can definitely understand why someone would not.
- Gravityloss 5y agoOh, I did enjoy it immensely! I guess this my review was high praise - coming from a Finn.
- corysama 5y agoIn the interview/documentary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territorie... Gibson is quite self-deprecating. He attributes several aspects of the book that people love to his inexperience as a writer. The main character is cold and vague because he didn’t know how to write a fleshed out character. People jack-in a lot because he was uncomfortable writing scene transitions. Something like “What do you say?? He got up and walked down the hallway to the apartment elevator and out the front door to the sidewalk’?”
- whoopdedo 5y agoReminds me of Gene Roddenberry needing to invent teleporters because the Enterprise couldn't land on a planet.
- noirbot 5y agoWhich is interesting because his descriptions of travel and scene transition in the most recent 5 books of his are deeply flowery and some of my favorite bits of his writing. I suppose writers change and grow over time, and I wonder if some of his style now is due to him trying to fix what he saw as flaws in his earlier work.
- Ekaros 5y agoThey do for example I started to skim through Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon(original release in 1942) and it is pretty horrid, quite badly aged and disconnected... Although it is translation the comments by others aren't exactly praising. Writing is like any pursuit, you just need to do it to develop and become better at it. Just like coding.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago> The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where everything revolves around the main character. I feel it's like this for two reasons: 1) Gibson himself says that he hasn't been a very good writer making Neuromancer, and that this is one of his weaker works, 2) but then again, we see the world from the POV of the protagonist and his brain filter. Case is not a very complicated man and this is how he sees the world. He chooses to focus on these things, and he treats people around him like NPCs. (Giving a convincing perspective of a character is what good writers do, so I think Gibson wasn't a shitty writer after all.)