s.penkevich's Reviews > Neuromancer
Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)
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I was watching Jeopardy a few weeks ago when I first heard of Gibson (Technology for 200: “I coined the term ‘cyberspace’”) and the next morning on my commute to work I heard another allusion to the Canadian author on NPR. A few days later, someone recommended I read Neuromancer so seeing as the stars were seemingly aligning to place a Gibson novel at the top of my ‘to-read’ list, I went out and bought this novel. I am glad I did. Not only did it remind me that I needed to read more sci-fi from time to time, but it was just good fun. It recalled my high school days of first watching Ghost in the Shell, or Bladerunner or even Cowboy Bebop. While Neuromancer, which brought cyberpunk to the main stream, may have its flaws, it delivers a good punch to the mind and will definitely keep you entertained.
Gibson is clearly ahead of his time. As I learned from Jeopardy, Gibson coined the term cyberspace in a short story of his back in the early 80’s. He created futures heavily reliant on the internet and virtual reality far before either would be actualized and it is impressive how he wasn’t far off the mark. In Neuromancer, which was the first novel to win Science Fiction’s triple crown of the Hugo, Nebula, and Phillip K Dick awards in 1984, washed up hacker Case is given a second chance after a double cross lead his former employer to inject a drug that would disable him from ever jacking into cyberspace again. His second chance into cyberspace comes with a job veiled in secrecy involving a powerful AI and some sort of elaborate break-in. Teamed up with a program of a dead friends personality and a mysterious woman named Molly, who Case is able to ride along with seeing the world through her eyes as he can literally hack into her brain and become a passenger in her body (begin mind melt), Case slowly pieces the job together as the danger and stakes rise.
It may not come across as the most ‘fresh’ story, or set of ideas, but that is due to this novel being a major influence on countless books and films to come. Back in 10th grade English, I remember classmates complaining that Shakespeare was riddled with clichés. Our teacher countered this saying that it only seems cliché since Shakespeare was the one who created this cliché in the first place. The same can be said of Gibson and Neuromancer. Here you will find discussion of cyberspace and the Matrix - a full realistic programmed world where the AI program Wintermute often brings Case to have a private discussion, that pop up constantly in later sci-fi works. The anime Ghost in the Shell may have found influences in this work and has several connections, and the film The Matrix has some obvious ties to both of these. It was hard not to just picture the lobby scene from the Matrix when reading Molly’s invasion of Sense/Net. This isn’t intended to be a rip on the film, seeing as Gibson himself was quoted as saying that The Matrix was “an innocent delight I hadn't felt in a long time” and also called Neo his favorite sci-fi hero ever (Wikipedia as a source doesn’t fly in the classroom, but it’s always a good one-stop research shop). It is also amusing to note that when Gibson first saw Bladerunner in 1982, he damn near gave up on Neuromancer figuring his audience would just regard it as a rip-off. Thankfully he finished and received a much better critical reception than he anticipated. It should be interesting when they finally get around to making this into a film (imdb.com claims one is in the works for a late 2012 release, but apparently a film for this has been in some sort of works since the 80’s without any camera finally getting the ‘record’ button pushed) if the general population, especially those who aren’t well-read, will cry that it is a cheap Matrix rip-off. That would be some irony. Also, you will find the origins of many band names (the title of part 4 is The Straylight Run to name one) and other film names (if you shit your pants as a kid to Event Horizon you will find its titles origin near the end of the novel).
Gibson does an excellent job creating this cyberpunk futuristic world, complete with new drugs and drug addictions, a strange blending of futuristic weapons and old ninja weapons, space stations, weird gravitation, and many others. He completely immerses the reader in his world and does not bother with slowing it down and feeding it to you and instead just keeps ticking off his invented names and ideas and letting the reader put them together as they go. Ice, for example, first caused me to scratch my head and wonder “what the hell is ice” before realizing it is a sort of anti-virus firewall of sorts. This technique gave the novel a better feel than others I have read where the author keeps removes the reader from the world to gloat about how creative his ideas for something are by overly describing it and its uses. It is occasionally humorous how his 1980’s ideas of the internet come across compared to the actual modern day internet, although his Tron-like virtual world where you immerse yourself into a visual internet seems much more badass than the internet I am looking at right now. As a reader you have to suspend your knowledge of what the actual internet and computers are like to fully appreciate and believe in Gibson’s vision, but this is altogether not distracting and can cause some giggles like watching an old Planet of the Apes film.
The characters are a bit flat and Gibson doesn’t employ the best use of language, but we are reading sci-fi here, not The Sound and the Fury so this is forgiven. Also, the ideas are enough to keep your mind working and there are a few mind-bending moments (I loved the concept of The Flatline and when Case sees himself through Molly). The flat characters are forgiven because there is a space station full of dub-listening, ganja-smoking, shotgun-toting Rastafarians and Gibson’s use of dialect for them kept a smile across my face. I fully endorse picking this up despite its flaws. If you were a fan of anime or The Matrix, this will give you that same dorky joy (I don’t embrace my dork-joy enough anymore) and you can see the origins of many sci-fi plots and concepts. But don’t just take my word for it, I’d recommend reading Mike Sullivan’s or K.D.’s reviews (and literally any of their other reviews, always spot-on) and Time also included this on their "Top 100 of the century" list. I will definitely read another of Gibson's books in the future.
3.5/5
Gibson is clearly ahead of his time. As I learned from Jeopardy, Gibson coined the term cyberspace in a short story of his back in the early 80’s. He created futures heavily reliant on the internet and virtual reality far before either would be actualized and it is impressive how he wasn’t far off the mark. In Neuromancer, which was the first novel to win Science Fiction’s triple crown of the Hugo, Nebula, and Phillip K Dick awards in 1984, washed up hacker Case is given a second chance after a double cross lead his former employer to inject a drug that would disable him from ever jacking into cyberspace again. His second chance into cyberspace comes with a job veiled in secrecy involving a powerful AI and some sort of elaborate break-in. Teamed up with a program of a dead friends personality and a mysterious woman named Molly, who Case is able to ride along with seeing the world through her eyes as he can literally hack into her brain and become a passenger in her body (begin mind melt), Case slowly pieces the job together as the danger and stakes rise.
It may not come across as the most ‘fresh’ story, or set of ideas, but that is due to this novel being a major influence on countless books and films to come. Back in 10th grade English, I remember classmates complaining that Shakespeare was riddled with clichés. Our teacher countered this saying that it only seems cliché since Shakespeare was the one who created this cliché in the first place. The same can be said of Gibson and Neuromancer. Here you will find discussion of cyberspace and the Matrix - a full realistic programmed world where the AI program Wintermute often brings Case to have a private discussion, that pop up constantly in later sci-fi works. The anime Ghost in the Shell may have found influences in this work and has several connections, and the film The Matrix has some obvious ties to both of these. It was hard not to just picture the lobby scene from the Matrix when reading Molly’s invasion of Sense/Net. This isn’t intended to be a rip on the film, seeing as Gibson himself was quoted as saying that The Matrix was “an innocent delight I hadn't felt in a long time” and also called Neo his favorite sci-fi hero ever (Wikipedia as a source doesn’t fly in the classroom, but it’s always a good one-stop research shop). It is also amusing to note that when Gibson first saw Bladerunner in 1982, he damn near gave up on Neuromancer figuring his audience would just regard it as a rip-off. Thankfully he finished and received a much better critical reception than he anticipated. It should be interesting when they finally get around to making this into a film (imdb.com claims one is in the works for a late 2012 release, but apparently a film for this has been in some sort of works since the 80’s without any camera finally getting the ‘record’ button pushed) if the general population, especially those who aren’t well-read, will cry that it is a cheap Matrix rip-off. That would be some irony. Also, you will find the origins of many band names (the title of part 4 is The Straylight Run to name one) and other film names (if you shit your pants as a kid to Event Horizon you will find its titles origin near the end of the novel).
Gibson does an excellent job creating this cyberpunk futuristic world, complete with new drugs and drug addictions, a strange blending of futuristic weapons and old ninja weapons, space stations, weird gravitation, and many others. He completely immerses the reader in his world and does not bother with slowing it down and feeding it to you and instead just keeps ticking off his invented names and ideas and letting the reader put them together as they go. Ice, for example, first caused me to scratch my head and wonder “what the hell is ice” before realizing it is a sort of anti-virus firewall of sorts. This technique gave the novel a better feel than others I have read where the author keeps removes the reader from the world to gloat about how creative his ideas for something are by overly describing it and its uses. It is occasionally humorous how his 1980’s ideas of the internet come across compared to the actual modern day internet, although his Tron-like virtual world where you immerse yourself into a visual internet seems much more badass than the internet I am looking at right now. As a reader you have to suspend your knowledge of what the actual internet and computers are like to fully appreciate and believe in Gibson’s vision, but this is altogether not distracting and can cause some giggles like watching an old Planet of the Apes film.
The characters are a bit flat and Gibson doesn’t employ the best use of language, but we are reading sci-fi here, not The Sound and the Fury so this is forgiven. Also, the ideas are enough to keep your mind working and there are a few mind-bending moments (I loved the concept of The Flatline and when Case sees himself through Molly). The flat characters are forgiven because there is a space station full of dub-listening, ganja-smoking, shotgun-toting Rastafarians and Gibson’s use of dialect for them kept a smile across my face. I fully endorse picking this up despite its flaws. If you were a fan of anime or The Matrix, this will give you that same dorky joy (I don’t embrace my dork-joy enough anymore) and you can see the origins of many sci-fi plots and concepts. But don’t just take my word for it, I’d recommend reading Mike Sullivan’s or K.D.’s reviews (and literally any of their other reviews, always spot-on) and Time also included this on their "Top 100 of the century" list. I will definitely read another of Gibson's books in the future.
3.5/5
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Reading Progress
November 20, 2011
– Shelved
November 27, 2011
–
Started Reading
December 5, 2011
–
32.1%
"I see why this is so widely acclaimed. Gibson was way ahead of his time. It's like Ghost in the Shell meets Cowboy Bebop, and I can't think of much higher praise."
page
87
December 15, 2011
–
Finished Reading
December 17, 2011
– Shelved as:
times-100-best
December 17, 2011
– Shelved as:
sci-fi
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Stephen M
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Aug 26, 2012 12:58AM
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Oh nice, that does sounds good, thank you. I've been meaning to get around to more of him
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First, some encouragement: the other's in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy are missing from your corpus of reviews - I found those to be just as engaging as Neuromancer. AND, they provide a nice expansion of his near-future world.
(Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive)
I believe you will find the characters in those just as "flat" - in a faintly peripheral way, Gibson's Sprawl novel are "historical fiction" - where the setting and culture are by far the most important "character".
(much old school SF is like that)
Aside from Gibson's work, I have little interest in "cyberpunk", cyber-culture, and related fantasies. GIbson is older than I am. My guess is that he is (was, with those novels) much more of a leader than a follower - unconcerned with what the kids are up to (or like). My bubble is almost certainly smaller than his - so consider that regards the following:
1) An earlier generation, who show little familarity with old-school SF (Heinlein, Asimov, Dick, Ellision, Clarke, Niven, et al) comment that Gibson's early work (all written in the eighties) is "dated". They cite various minutae that didn't "come true". My take is that, considering the broad strokes, Gibson is more prescient than the vast majority of SF writers.
(at some point, with my own review, I'll detail that)
(and now, see below)
1A) I'll back off that thesis in one large respect - I believe Gibson posited "enclosed climates" (?) on a large scale (?) I think that will only come to pass (if ever) at a time mcuh later than his world (still, 60 years hence - and still advancing)
2) I remember the first time I read "cyberspace" in the "venacular". This was circa 1995, when the computer sitting on my desk was a "midrange" unit with a whole GIG of storage, a 100MHz Pentium processor, and one of the first commerical installs of Windows 95 (Microsoft's "answer" to the Mac GUI).
It had a 28.8kbps modem and connected via a twisted telephone pair to "the internet
(actually, it wasn't until 1999 that my employer had email - it was MY 33MHz 80386 that had the modem)
(let me add - that I now get freakin' video over a twisted pair - a tech miracle if ther ever was one)
Back to the point - in 1995 I laughed up my sleeve that static HTML-pages was the practical representation of "cyberspace" - nothing like the "consenual hallucination" that Gibson described in 1983.
This remains for me the most premature appropriation of an SF coinage.
"ice” is) a sort of anti-virus firewall
I just confirmed, using google books, that Gibson spells out the acronym: "intrusion countermeasures electronics". IIRC the "countermeasures" can be nasty. Not merely defensive, they can attack the "cowboy" via his implanted jack. This "hacking" stuff can be nasty (though "hack", meaning what a cowboy does, is not the verb he uses)
(google books accomodates - Case says (to "rasta-speaking" Maelcum):
"I've got to interface it (a computer virus) through the deck" before it can work on anythig )
Let me note that the virus is stored on a "cassette" - which may one of those "misses" cyberpunk fans "noticed".
Within a page Case says to rasta-bot (uhhh - boy) : "are you sentient or not"
"It feels like I am"
(see how not-dated this is?)
Then rasta-boy "scan(ned) its instruction face" for Case - said:
"It's a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target."
"Or an AI. Can we run it?"
"Sure, unless you got a morbid fear of dying"
OK - this confirms that ICE can be deadly.
Anyway, let me reiterate, that you should run (not walk) and buy, steal, rent, pillage those other two Sprawl Novels. Look for "Virek" in Mona Lisa Overdrive for a creepy near-future view of life-extension for the ultra-wealthy.
(see if google books can offer a preview)
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Thank you! Yea, thats quite true. I once compared the Gordon Lish-edited versions of Raymond Carver with the unedited versions of the stories and found I tended to prefer whichever I had read first and I suppose it has something to do with that being what your mind decides is the "staple" and anything else the incongruities seem somehow wrong instead of just different?