Stephen's Reviews > Neuromancer

Eureka!...Hallelujah!...I've had a wondrous epiphany!
I finally get it...I have seen the light and understanding has dawned. Gibson’s manifest brilliance has revealed itself to me and I am left humbled and quivering in AWE.

After a rocky, tumultuous courtship that oscillated between respect and frustration through my first two readings of Neuromancer, number 3 became the CHARMing, rapturous awakening into a hopelessly devoted, head over heals love affair that I’m confident will last a lifetime. Now, with the ebullient fervor of the newly converted, I feel compelled to give testimony and proselytize the glory that is William Gibson’s singular masterpiece.

To begin...a small history.

INITIAL THOUGHTS:

My first exposure to this book was late in the 1990‘s, long after it had already spent over a decade as the magical source of all things cyberpunk. I came to it after having read several of its prolific spawn and decided it was time to visit the source code.

My first mistake...for “Neuromancer” is not the first cyberpunk novel or at least, that is not all it is...not even close. I viewed the novel within the narrow confines of the world that it had created and completely missed its true magic. I saw the novel through the fog of my faulty preconceptions.

I believed Neuromancer to be a jargon-heavy, inside joke by the techno-savvy and the computer literate as they thumbed their nose at the tech-tarded luddites who couldn’t see the pending future that lay before them. I saw this as a novel for the cyberspacially erudite, and those not coded for the new paradigm were to be left behind in the trash heap of history along with the abacus and the printed word.

For those who have had a similar reaction to this book, you...I...we were so, so, SO wrong.

It missed the point entirely. Neuromancer didn’t preach to the creators of the new, new thing...it wasn’t even, at its core, about technology...at least not in the instructional manual, code-writing sense of the word. William Gibson was more techno-stupid than techno-proficient and his interpretation of the interpretation of the future was the vision of an artist not an engineer. In fact, the few areas where Gibson had any knowledge about what he was writing are the areas that have become the most anachronistic.

What Gibson did see...with a clarity and exactitude that would make Nostradamus green with envy, was the path on which humanity was travelling. Increased dependance on technology, increased detachment among individuals and a blurring of lines between nations. And all of this led to that central, crystalizing vision of cyberspace, artificial intelligence and the world wide web.

And now we come to the reason why this book belongs among the MOST IMPORTANT WORKS OF LITERATURE ever created. Gibson’s inspired, non-technical vision of the future was the lightning that created the fire of inspiration for the generation that then made his vision come to pass. The teenagers and bidding technophiles of the 1980’s saw the “fictional elements” of Gibson’s novel and said, “holy shit, wouldn’t that be cool"...and proceeded to make it so.

From Neuromancer's memorable first words, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” to the final, mind-shattering conclusion of the mystery of Winter Mute...this novel is probably the greatest example of life imitating art that literature has ever known and our world would be profoundly different, for good or for ill, in the absence of this amazing work.

....WOW, sorry for waxing on so long, but like I said, I am the newly converted.

PLOT SUMMARY:

Our protagonist, Case, is an amoral, ex-cyber cowboy (i.e., hacker) whose former bosses destroyed his ability to enter the matrix (i.e., cyberspace) as a punishment for his stealing from them.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

Since his involuntary exile from the matrix, Case has become self-destructive and suicidal and is hell bent on shuffling off this mortal coil but is unwilling or unable to accomplish the task himself.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void… The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

in his "i wanna die" despondency, Case has been taking the most dangerous scores, the biggest risks, all along waiting for someone to put him out of his “meat-trapped” misery.

That is the "hero" of our little tale.

After this brief intro and some layered world-building involving Chiba City, Case finds himself recruited by a group of criminals who agree to “cure him” in exchange for working with them on a complex caper involving aspects of cyberspace hacking and real world breaking and entering. That is really the basic set up (though it gives you less than a hint of the real flavor of the book). The heist/hack is really comprised of two primary “jobs” that are both connected to a burgeoning artificial intelligence known as Winter Mute. That is really a bare bones description of the plot, but there are so many well crafted summaries floating around that I wanted to stick mainly with commentary.

MORE THOUGHTS:

Gibson’s prose is like nothing I have read before and it took me a while to come to grips with that statement. Gibson’s writing is poetry, not jargon. It's personal, internal and emotional, not cold and externally descriptive. It's the dark, fevered dream of a world where humanity and technology have been inextricably fused together with results both miraculous and profane. His prose is slick and jagged like a serrated knife; beautiful, breezy and hard-edged. His verse is color of gunmetal and electricity and the texture of anger spilling on a meadow of dashed hope and unearned rewards. It is as much about mood as it is about message. Here’s an example:

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding...The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.

Yeah, I am a big, big fan. In case I wasn't clear about that before, I don’t want you to think I was being wishy-washy. Before i wrap up, here is one more example of the visual, visceral nature of Gibson’s verse:

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.

A unique, important and truly amazing reading experience and it only took me three tries to realize it. DOH!!!!

6.0 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!

Winner: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Winner: Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Winner: Philip K. Dick Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Nominee: John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Nominee: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Nominee: Locus Award for Best First Novel
Nominee: British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel