Neuromancer Book

Average Rating:

Well, people who are not good at reading, and you can usually identify them first through spelling errors, hated the book. People who are really into the "alternate worlds" thing think it's super cool. I find both of these positions to be ignorant and one-sided. One is just as bad as the other. The jargon was, to me, not too difficult to figure out, and I think it worked better than, or at least as well as (in its own way), the indecipherable slang of "A Clockwork Orange," by Anthony Burgess. The point here is, the slang of Gibson's world IS technical jargon. Hmm. There's an idea. Gibson has given us a world that, despite his stumblings and fumblings in telling the story (which English majors like myself might--MIGHT--be willing to consider a stylistic choice on the part of the author, to add to the sense of darkness and confusion), seems REAL. It is a very, very human world, and this is a very human novel. It is about identity in a world with no higher purposes than gratification of needs and desires; even you churchgoers out there might get the idea sometimes in the back of your mind that even religion serves only to gratify and soothe, to take our attention away from the essential horror and loneliness of the human condition. What is the motivation of any character in this novel? Gratification of desire, extension of life, money, etc. The "cyberpunk" elements of the book are, to me, incidental to what is at its core a poem about solitude, impermanence, and the shifting sands of human life. What is the last line of the book?

"He never saw Molly again."

This is not a good book, or a bad one. It is what Hemingway might have called a "true book"--one that touches a fundamental truth about the circumstances in which we find ourselves, here on this ball of dust and water, fighting our all-too-short battles against the relentless parade of entropy, and its child, loss. The good is good, and the bad is bad, yin is yin and yang is yang, but remember the symbol of the two opposites--one is defined by the other, and neither has the advantage.

So begins William Gibson's prophetic and apocryphal novel NEUROMANCER, the first in his SPRAWL Trilogy and arguably the most important Science Fiction novel of the Century. In a single, mind-bending work, Gibson propelled an entire generation into a new era of information perception, an era that has since woven itself strand-by-strand into the global information nexus we call the World Wide Web.

It begins with Case, a young and bitter cyberspace cowboy prowling the neon-lit streets of Chiba City, in search of his lost identity. Robbed of his talent for working the Matrix as a data thief and cyberspace pirate, his life is a bleak and desolate journey towards self-destruction. Until the day a mirror-eyed assassin offers him a second chance.

Suddenly Case is an unwitting pawn in a game whose board stretches from Chiba to the Sprawl to an orbiting pleasure colony populated by Ninja clones and Zion-worshipping Rastafarian spacers. The job: to hack the unhackable. To break the ICE around an Artificial Intelligence and release it from its own hardwired mind. But at every turn Case is haunted by the shadows of his own dark past, and pursued by a faceless enemy whose very presence can kill.

Ironically, William Gibson tapped out the wonders of NEUROMANCER on a manual typewriter, and was certain it was fated for the Out Of Print stack or a quiet cult following. But now, over ten years later and still in print, it has become a kind of cultural landmark in a sea of Information; a chrome-and-silicon avatar of everything from the World Wide Web to Virtual Reality. NEUROMANCER must not be explained or related; it must be experienced, taken in through the pores and rolled against the tongue like electric adrenaline. And there is only one way to do so.

Pick up a copy. And jack in.

Clay Douglas Major

I read this book twice and each time got an enormous amount out of it. One reading just doesn't do it for this one. What some call Gibson's "confusing" style is actually a carefully calculated and ingenious device to make the reader actually feel as if he has been dropped into Gibson's world. He doesn't introduce aspects of his future like they're just wacky things he made up (whereas Neal Stephenson DOES), but rather like they are actual things whose history he is recording. His vividly imagined world takes on an eerily realistic quality this way. You learn to find your way around his world like a child learning a language- you just have to listen to it and wait.

Gibson has a lot of fun extrapolating social phenomena into the future, in the same way that lesser scifi writers meerly like to dream up new technologies. And he addresses the issue of man's relationship with the machines he creates like nothing else- to what extent are we machines? what is the human mind ultimately capable of, and what are its intrinsic shortcomings?

The bizarre humor of this book is a delight. The characterizations of Ratz and The Finn, for example, are absolutely classic. And the description of Case and Molly's run on Sense/Net near the beginning of the book is one of the most funny, gripping, intense, and fascinating sequences you will ever read.

Like it or not, this book is incredibly real. Neuromancer is exciting, intriguing, beautiful, decadent, surprising, upsetting, and an all-around incredible page-turner.