NEUROMANCER

[E. Magill]

The book for September/October, as chosen by the ever-reliable kwirk, is

NEUROMANCER by William Gibson

This is an exciting one for me, and the first one thus far that I've actually read before. It's the landmark cyberpunk novel, and a nice counterpoint for our last book, Snow Crash. In fact, when I was reading Snow Crash, I couldn't help but compare it to Neuromancer, and I'm super-excited that I'll be able to delve into the similarities and differences. I've been meaning to reread Neuromancer for years, because it was highly influential for me when I was still trying my hand at writing a full-length novel. There's also a movie in the works (allegedly), so there's another reason to read it!

Here's the Amazon description:

"The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus- hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace . . .

Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

Hotwired to the leading edges of art and technology, Neuromancer ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the century's most potent visions of the future."

[kwirk]

Disappointed. I'm looking forward to other viewpoints because I really wanted to like this book.

Again I did the Audio version and my dislike of the reader may be a factor. I didn't like how the characters were portrayed and several of the voices reminded me of the "family guy" elderly pedaphile.

I think this may have been more ground breaking in its time but I've recently read books with better descriptions of virtual environments, ai depictions, and futuristic settings.

I may not have "gotten it". I don't get the purpose of the wintermute and neuromancer subroutines. And the hive family seemed under whelming. The namesake of the book doesn't seem all that awesome to me. Part of it may be my dislike of Linda. I thought she was a junkie and i didn't buy the relationship with Case much. (she also happened to have one of the pedaphile voices so I may be biased) so using her as a lure at the end didn't seem so tempting to me.

Also the whole getting Case "angry" at something seemed a little disappointing. I thought it would lead to something cooler than just being able to perform better.

I don't know. I think the general problem was I couldn't get immersed and emotionally connected to the setting, plot or characters. I didn't see the point of it all. I'm hoping someone else's thoughts will enlighten me.

[E. Magill]

I'll grant that cyberpunk has come a long way since Neuromancer, with descriptions of cyberspace, AI, and such getting more and more refined. Still, I feel like the meat of Neuromancer is a lot deeper and more interesting than any other cyberpunk novel I've read. Snow Crash is a good example: its characters make more sense, the writing is more coherent, the style is more consistent, and the universe it builds is easier to imagine. However, the plot of Snow Crash felt like a big let-down to me, especially compared to Neuromancer.

(As a side note, I recently read Ready Player One, and that has the best descriptions I've ever read of a virtual universe. I wouldn't call that book cyberpunk, though, at least not in the conventional sense.)

I see Neuromancer as the most logical written description of Kurtzweil's concept of the Singularity. Gibson has created a future where AI has been created, but chained, and where a pair of AIs created by eccentric billionaires serve as the right and left brains of a new form of consciousness that exceeds humanity in every way. The Neuromancer half--the right brain--is true immortality in digital form, a playground for the mind, while the Wintermute half--the left brain--is a concrete processor of reality so powerful that mere mortals cannot even begin to comprehend its true motives. When the two are finally unchained and put together, it launches the next step in technological evolution (with the hint that other, alien civilizations in Alpha Centauri reached that same step already), the singularity.

Gibson, as a writer, has matured a lot in the last thirty years. His more recent novel, Pattern Recognition, is by all measures a better novel, but I don't think he can ever recapture Neuromancer, the book that launched an entire subgenre of sci-fi that thrives largely without him today.

I tried listening to one of his other cyberpunk novels, Mona Lisa Overdrive (set in the same universe, incidentally, as Neuromancer), as an audiobook from audible, but I REALLY hated the voices. I don't know if Neuromancer was done by the same reader, but if so, I can appreciate why it may have turned you off to it. I also think it helps that I had read this book a long time ago and was rereading it, picking up on things I didn't get before or had forgotten over the years.

But the most astounding thing, I think, about Neuromancer is how much Gibson accurately predicts. Neuromancer was written in 1983, for crying out loud, and there are analogues for the Internet (the matrix), memes (he waxes poetic about the rise and fall of subculture references that take days if not hours), Anonymous (the Panther Moderns), Google (the Hosaka, sort of), firewalls (ICE, though technically that was a real thing in 1983), worm-style computer viruses, and even tempurpedic mattresses. Sure, he may not have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, but really, who did? As a futurist, I don't think anybody, not even Jules Verne, can claim to have the positive hit-miss ratio of William Gibson.

Even if you can't appreciate it for what it is, you have to acknowledge the ridiculously enormous cultural impact this one novel has had. Without Neuromancer, we wouldn't have Ghost in the Shell, the Matrix, Snow Crash, etc. Cyberpunk probably wouldn't even be a thing.

Still, a lot of kwirk's criticisms are valid. I don't particularly like Linda either, but I understand what she represents for Case, a man who has flirted heavily with self-destruction (I think that may be what you missed about the "angry" bit; I may be wrong, but the way I read it, he had to realize that his anger had always been directed at himself, thus reaching some kind of self-actualization zen peace with his place in the universe or whatever). I agree that her relationship with Case was never really shown, thus making it hard to connect to, but Linda, as pathetic a human being as she is, makes sense for the person Case is at the start of the story. Then again, I don't particularly like Case either. He's not a consistently written protagonist, and I think he breaks character at least once in order to move the plot along, if not more.

Now the real question: who do you cast in the movie? Rumor has it they've approached Liam Neeson (I'm assuming for Armitage, which is perfect) and Mark Wahlburg (presumably for Case, though I'm not shall we say enthused by that idea), though nothing has been officially announced or leaked yet. Who would you cast as Molly?

[kwirk]

I do admit this book was pretty visionary. I take it for granted since it all just seems like the logical next step now, but then it was pretty out there.

You read a lot more into the AI left/right brain thing than I did. The way you put it sounds intriguing but I have a hard time jumping from the book to your interpretation. Maybe I spaced out a little when listening. I adopt the idea that these AI's are too complicated for me to understand and I am just seeing the surface. Hence my misunderstanding is just a result of their complexity and my puny brain.

Movie: Mark Wahlburg NO! not for case at least, he's too muscular for a junkie techie. Maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt or someone. I'm not really up to speed on my actors/actresses. But someone wiry or chunky get's my vote.

For Molly I've always thought Jessica Beil would be a good for an athletic female role. I don't know much about her as an actress but she has a solid athletic build that I like for the role.

[sarahcv]

I didn't care for Neuromancer. Although I have to admit, I didn't finish it, so it might have picked up toward the end. I just couldn't bring myself to slog through it. Time spent reading a book can be used as a metric of how much it was enjoyed. “I couldn’t put it down,” “I read it in one sitting,” etc. It took me over four weeks to get just over a third of the way through it. It was a dull, painful slog and I finally decided that I had already spent too much time on it. Life is too short.

I understand that Neuromancer was seminal to the cyberpunk genre. If anything, that fact made me stick with it long after I otherwise would have thrown it out. Maybe some of the ideas presented sparked better ideas for better writers. Knowing its influence was vast & deep did not make it any less boring.

You see this a lot with genre literature: the assumption is that if you have an interesting setting and some interesting concepts, you don’t have to tell a good story. And for some readers, the story is optional. I am not one of them. The characters were flat and their behavior was inconsistent, like even the author didn’t care very much about them beyond their superficial characteristics. Look at this gal, she’s got permanent sunglasses and blades in her fingernails! Okay, cool, but what sort of person is she? Who cares, there's cool tech over here!

I was most put off by the voice of the writing. I see that Gibson was going for a “tough guy in the big city,” Raymond Chandler sort of thing, and that’s cool. But when it’s done badly you get exactly what happened here: a disjointed, almost random collection of details that don’t do a very good job of describing what’s happening. It was like the author was so impatient to get to the parts that HE thought were good that he couldn't be bothered to fill out a story around them.

Sorry, not for me. I'd put Snow Crash miles ahead of this one, if only because most of the read was enjoyable, even if the ending was weak.

[E. Magill]

Can't say I blame you, Sarah. The book does pick up towards the end, but it does take a long time to get there. Also, if I read it for the first time today, I'd probably feel the same way. It hasn't aged well.