8 ms·
William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)
- babblingfish 1y agoI didn't realize the Mountain View Library still has books on cassette tapes. Neat!
- stevenwoo 1y agoIt’s mostly older stuff the Santa Clara county library has acquired over the years, along with books on CD. A lot of stuff is now on Libby/Hoopla and they even have MP3 players with just one book on them you can rent.
- hamonrye34 1y agoPlanting Accelerando's. Ayn Rand Institute will shelf Atlas en-mass to public libaries.
- themadturk 1y agoSo glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about The Difference Engine. (And I don't generally dislike Sterling...this book just didn't work for me.)
- khedoros1 1y agoI remember starting that book, but not getting far into it. It didn't click for me, either. That was a number of years ago though. Maybe I owe it a retry.
- themadturk 1y agoI've actually read it twice, didn't actually hate it...but I also don't remember anything about it, which is patently untrue about other Gibson books. I may owe it a third try as well.
- anigbrowl 1y agoSame. I love Gibson's writing, I love Sterling's, but TDE remains on my bottom 5 books I've ever read. To this day if someone mentions steampunk I flee for the exits. I feel bad about this because I bought it in hardback on the book promo tour and Bruce Sterling signed it for me, we even had a chat because the bookstore wasn't busy and I told him how much I was looking forward to reading it. In my guilty subconscious he is still at the same store, waiting for a customer who promised to come back and never did. I'm sorry Bruce.
- sevensor 1y agoAgreed, and it’s all the more surprising because one of my favorite short stories is a collaboration between the two of them: “Red Star, Winter Orbit.” The Difference Engine just doesn’t work for me though.
- mbirth 1y agoThere seems to be a playlist on YouTube with slightly better quality: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYn090EvNBcinpVcrKNmYAHojxP7pnYC1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYn090EvNBcinpVcrKNmY... *EDIT:* There's also the CD version somewhere out there. Here's a Reddit post where someone ripped it (but didn't make it available): https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuromancer/comments/1gr7k4n/audiobook_presented_by_william_gibson_himself_5cd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuromancer/comments/1gr7k4n/audiob...
- ElijahLynn 1y agothanks, the OP is of lesser quality compared to this one.
- amatecha 1y agoYeah, I took a quick listen to OP -- unfortunately their mp3s are of very poor quality. I heard numerous glitches while listening :(
- muricula 1y agoI think the audio quality gives this recording character. What could be more cyberpunk than hearing the quirky artifacts resulting from ripping an obsolete recording medium?
- jszymborski 1y agoI was about to say, feels more of its time...
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoA little embarrassing when the 1970s technology is better than the 1990s.
- robotresearcher 1y ago‘Worse is better’ in effect. MP3 trades quality for convenience. Edit: I read above that these particular MP3s are corrupted, so they have a serious enjoyability issue.
- viccis 1y agoI listened to Neuromancer on a long drive one time, and I will say that it's a wonderful book but not one that's particularly suited to the audiobook medium. It's hard to follow at times because it avoids a lot of big picture narrative and instead focuses on very small scale scenes of events happening within a broader story. It means that it can be confusing at times, as you are often as in the dark as the characters are. This is an abridged version, so maybe it streamlines some aspects of the narrative, so take that into account.
- whartung 1y agoI’ve tried to listen to a book on tape on a long drive twice. And each time I was lucky to not drive into an abutment. For whatever reason, the droning just knocks me unconscious. Talk radio is ok, sports radio. I’ve listened to more radio plays with multiple speakers. Those are ok. But books on tape, nope. Too dangerous for me.
- guerrilla 1y agoI also listened to it as an audiobook and while I very much got the vibe, I have no idea what was going on, which is kinda rare (I listen to a lot of audiobooks). It's as if I didn't even read it... buy kinda did. I duno.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoi've read neuromancer at least five times and i still feel like i never actually read it. it's a weirdly-written book with little environmental exposition - but i still love it.
- prettyblocks 1y agoCame to say exactly this. It's my favorite, but I still feel like I haven't read it after like 5 reads.
- mindcrime 1y ago
- roughly 1y agoThis is probably something worth submitting to the Internet Archive if you’re worried about it disappearing!
- neilv 1y agoThat reminds me. I probably have a rough video of part of an author talk by Richard Dawkins... speaking from a church pulpit. It was an old church, with acoustics that worked pre-electronics. At the start of the talk, Dawkins remarked, something like, being up there, he now understands why some preachers speak the way they do. The book store would borrow the church as a venue for author talks, and it was only a funny coincidence that Dawkins's book that time was, IIRC, "The God Delusion". (I'll have to see whether I still have it on an old computer, then contact the hosting venue, to see whether this can be preserved in a respectful way, on archive.org. Or they might already/still have a better recording.)
- tomhow 1y agoPreviously: William Gibson reads Neuromancer, from tape to mp3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021369 - April 2017 (3 comments) Re. the date: - The original book was published in 1984 - This abridged audio reading seems to have been published in 1994 - This article was published in 2004
- amatecha 1y agoYears ago I was blown away to learn about this "Gibson reads Neuromancer" audio book only when I heard it sampled in a song[0] by Haujobb (the band, not the demoscene group). I recognized the words as being from Neuromancer, one of my top favorite books, but I wasn't aware of where it was from. Had to do some searching online to discover the audio was sampled from Gibson's reading of his own book. Very cool surprise! (as an aside, if you like cyberpunk-esque music, can absolutely recommend this band - check out "Solutions for a Small Planet") [0] https://haujobb.bandcamp.com/track/penetration-fuck-the-floor https://haujobb.bandcamp.com/track/penetration-fuck-the-floo... at 2m45s
- tensorlibb 1y agoI love how W.G. still reads well to this day. Have so many good memories as an early teen ripping through his work as fast as I could. Enjoyed every single page.
- jdkee 1y agoI am currently teaching Neuromancer as the primary text for a first-year studies course on cyberspace. It is absolutely incredible re-reading that text and marveling at Gibson's vision of the future (which with science fiction is really a commentary on the now).
- bickfordb 1y agoRecommend the Peripheral TV series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) Hopefully they renew it eventually
- shmerl 1y agoApparently the show for Neuromancer itself is now in production.
- BruceEel 1y agoYes, indeed! Apple already posted a teaser, ft. the Chatsubo: https://x.com/GreatDismal/status/1940130126202839445
- 4ggr0 1y agoi love that a big tech corp will bring us new Neuromancer content.
- shmerl 1y agoIrony isn't lost on that.
- BruceEel 1y agoMaybe for maximum effect it should have been a Japanese company... (maybe Sony, who, IIRC, at some point in the past have required installation of proprietary software/DRM in order to play their content, snuck in a rootkit in the process too, which is itself a kind of cyberpunky thing to do I guess but I digress...)
- speed_spread 1y agoIt's been cancelled. Forever. It wasn't bad but it was deviating significantly from the book in good and less good ways. Some of the new stuff was interesting. I'm not sure where they were going with the story. It's probably a good thing that they stopped it.
- gabriel666smith 1y agoA real classic. As an author who was asked by my publisher to perform my own audiobook: 1. There is a reason 'reader of audiobooks' is a profession - it is stupid difficult. I will never do it again. 2. I loved this tape so much. It does such interesting things with its soundscape (from memory - if it actually is just Gibson reading it, then he must have embedded those memories through the sheer brilliance of his performance. 3. My fiancee is partially-sighted (I see her as an investment that will appreciate as biohacking becomes more and more prevalent) and she reads mostly by audiobook. It's not really how I prefer to read - I get distracted too easily - but I've been appalled at the production quality of what I've overheard. While Gibson's work is a special case, an audiobook is only one dimension away from a film adaptation. 4. Literally all my millennial-Gen-Z-cusp friends who are non-readers opted for the audiobook of my book, not the book-book. Anecdata, but interesting. They would just switch Rogan or whatever out during their commute until they felt they'd listened to (what I assume as) enough of it to be socially acceptable. 5. I have no market knowledge other than that I signed my audiobook rights away to my publishers in the industry-standard way. 6. I'm sure it'd be very easy to procure data that made a case for audio fiction that was well-produced and incorporated soundscape-like elements, being incredibly commercially successful. It strikes me as a form that is ripe for innovation. And everyone loves books on tape. 7. There has been so much really interesting innovation in 'aural mood amendment' over the last decade or two. Some of it seems like pseudoscience, some of it seems legit - I wish I had sources to share. Apologies that I don't. 8. I assume someone has already built this concept - well-produced, soundscape-driven longform audio fiction - I'm not a consumer of that market well enough to know it. It'd be a really, really fun project. I'm sure it'd be very tough to get profitable, but it's almost too fun to care. This could be another reason it doesn't exist. 9. Gibson's 2003(?) novel Pattern Recognition is insanely underrated - probably not by people here - but I think the prose is better, and in a decade or two it will feel just as (if not more) prescient. It's a really, really good example of a literary classic that didn't get attention from book dweebs because it's from a 'genre' guy. If you like Neuromancer, and want to think about the next couple of decades in a similar way, you will really love it. I always thought it'd make a great double-bill with the movie Children of Men .
- throwawayben 1y ago
- _spduchamp 1y agoOh, I have those cassettes and listened to them on a 6 hour drive a couple weeks ago. Hearing it from start to finish, all in one go was very emmersive. I just needed a little bit of nicotine gum to stay awake through Gibson's drawling voice and U2's dub accompaniment. The return trip was Einstein's Dreams on cassette read by Michael York. That voice is a treat.for the ears.
- speakspokespok 1y agoA number of years ago driving late one evening an interview of his came on the radio. It might have originally been WGBH or a Canadian affiliate I can't recall, but just listening to him talk and expound on his views of the world gave the same thrill as reading Neuromancer and that same thrill of exploring the world through a phone line.
- exitb 1y agoI can recommend „No Maps for These Territories” (found bootleg on YouTube) for that kind of thing.
- pdntspa 1y agoNice to see direct links to MP3 files. More websites should follow that example.
- landonxjames 1y agoThere was a fantastic soundtrack created for this audiobook in the 90s by the industrial group Black Rain. https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/neuromancer https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/neuromancer
- somenameforme 1y agoWow, that is absolutely phenomenal! This alone makes me want to listen to the audio book, which would be my first. Perhaps a dumb question, but are ambient tracks and/or similar fx stuff common in audio books? I'd always assumed it was simply a reading.
- colechristensen 1y agoMany audiobooks have brief music interludes between major sections, but generally that's it, just narration. Soundbooth Theater does exactly that with music and sound effects https://soundbooththeater.com/ https://soundbooththeater.com/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ehnto 1y agoWoah, thank you so much for posting this. What an atmosphere.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- teekert 1y agoI've been reading Neuromancer, had it on my list for long time... But I just can't get through it. It moves slowly, the main character makes dumb choices (facepalm level), has a flat personality, sex is very male-centric and flat/unimaginative (but that is in most older scifi "here an interesting female with a loose sexual morale to spice up the story"). I stopped somewhere half way. Someone spoiled the plot so I know it should get epic at some point but I just can't get there. Am I the only one?
- pferde 1y agoI mean, the main character is a washed out, aging, drug junkie has-been, of course he makes bad choices. :)
- AlanYx 1y agoMolly is actually a fairly interesting and complex character if you follow her from Johnny Mnenmonic all the way through Neuromancer (especially the second half) and Mona Lisa Overdrive. It's tempting to write off Case's behavior as just a realistic portrayal of a washed up addict, but thematically there's a strong and likely intentional parallel between the way he's coming apart and the way one of the main AIs in the story is coming apart. If you add in Linda Lee and the other AI, what Gibson was trying to do becomes a lot clearer. I'm intentionally being vague to avoid spoilers.
- yrro 1y agoI've had this sequence of quotations from various classic cyberpunk stories burned into my mind for the last 30 years. The slow zoom into the disembodied head on the cover of Neuromancer, while the visual and audio effects increase in intensity over the narration, "lines of light, ranged in the non-space of the mind" is particularly striking: https://youtu.be/VuZonQVN4uw?t=556 https://youtu.be/VuZonQVN4uw?t=556 Was that read by Gibson himself?
- frankfrank13 1y agoTIL there is a william gibson documentary (although it looks to be missing) -- http://www.nomaps.com/ http://www.nomaps.com/ JK I found it -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIDVvhy9Z0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIDVvhy9Z0I
- tgv 1y agoI didn't have more problems reading Neuromancer than others, quite enjoyed it, but listening to it is not easy. The names and the random nouns that have acquired new meanings (like sprawl, chiba), are hard to parse for non-native speakers. Harder than in text, IMO.
- zquestz 1y agoThere is a much higher quality version of this posted on IPFS. https://bafybeifvyimyhbmn4ml3ewleepiaahaultucbs6nnzu6qwswld62yjvwgy.ipfs.dweb.link https://bafybeifvyimyhbmn4ml3ewleepiaahaultucbs6nnzu6qwswld6...
- NetOpWibby 1y agoI found a FLAC torrent, here's the info hash: afb177e0703e345db3a176f05f4086b81ef310d0