Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Neuromancer

Towards the end of this novel, the protagonists, Case and Molly, are walking down the rooms of the Villa Straylight, which looks like an abandoned and labyrinthine library or museum, spinning in orbit around the Earth. At one point, Molly passes by the shattered glass pane of Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece, La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. Gibson’s reference to the cubist and dadaist artist, at this point of the novel, might look casual and unsubstantial; but to me, it implies a lot about the whole novel’s lineage.

In Neuromancer, as in Duchamp, there is this massive display of artefacts and dehumanised techno stuff: on the one hand, computers, artificial intelligence, cyberspace, ROM modules, augmented ninjas, razorblade-fingertips, cyberspies, stealth aircraft, orbital space habitats (Gibson); on the other hand, a urinal, a staircase, a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a waterfall and illuminating gas, a box in a suitcase, lumps of sugar in a birdcage (Duchamp).

There are also, in contrast to this, many graphic displays of organic and anatomic parts: on the one hand, blood vessels, drug addiction, pancreas and liver, reconstructive surgery, cryonic clones, disembowelled skulls and sexual intercourses (Gibson); on the other, a spread-legged female holding a gas lamp, a descending nude, a stripped bride and a switching from virgin to bride, Mona Lisa’s hot arse, and whatever could be exposed at the fountain (Duchamp).

The junction of these two contradictory movements, dirty bodies and hallucinatory objects, is precisely what defined surrealism in the 1920s. It is, too, what defined Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Blade Runner (which references Un Chien Andalou in subtle ways) and William Gibson’s debut novel in the early 1980s — around the same time as Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, when “cyberspace” wasn’t even a reality outside of Gibson's imagination. Even the very first sentence, “The sky above the port was the color of television” has the flavour of surrealism, redolent of Paul Éluard's “La Terre est bleue comme une orange”. Gibson's novel is in turn a seminal work, ahead of Ghost in the Shell, Akira, The Matrix, Snow Crash, the whole pop culture movement labelled as “cyberpunk”, and down to Nolan's Inception in recent years, as well as mainstream sheer entertainment works, such as Ready Player One.

If it were not for the science fiction setting and Gibson’s rather outlandish ideas, the overall plot would probably sit alongside the espionage and spy thrillers of John Le Carré, Tom Clancy, Ken Follett or Ian Fleming. However, Neuromancer’s messy, fast-paced plotline is a bit secondary and, quite frankly, silly and hard to follow.

William Gibson’s writing, despite his regular use of slang, jargon and ironical repartee, has a surprising rhythm throughout, a sort of syncopated prosody, ending most of his sections with the recurring line “He flipped” or “He jacked in/out”. His musical style makes Gibson a prominent prose writer, tied with American authors such as Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut (remember “So it goes”) or Thomas Pynchon — I would even venture to say that Pynchon’s last novel, Bleeding Edge, is indebted to Gibson’s debut novel.