21–30 of 87 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book was released in 1984. Could it be that his descriptions of tech were just true to the times? I imagine his stylistic embellishments were also important in the same way older movies about technology (e.g. Hackers[0]) stylize digital events. [0]: https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69
It was routinely criticized as not being true to IT when it came out.
Read the book for the first time last year. I heard from some people that it hadn't aged too well—that it should be viewed as more of a precursor to things like Snowcrash —but I really loved it. In particular, the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so vivid and disorienting. (Or I guess "hypnagogic", to use a Gibsonian word.) A less talented author would…
If you like this, you may enjoy Jeff Noon.
I just finished the audiobook of Neuromancer a week ago, and I didn't really enjoy it. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it. I love other what I think of as similar books like Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I had high hopes for Neuromancer, which maybe that was part of it, but I just didn't enjoy it. It kind of turned into a slog and I nearly gave up at around 90%, but just pushed through because I…
Read the book for the first time last year. I heard from some people that it hadn't aged too well—that it should be viewed as more of a precursor to things like Snowcrash —but I really loved it. In particular, the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so vivid and disorienting. (Or I guess "hypnagogic", to use a Gibsonian word.) A less talented author would…
> the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so colorful and enticing. If you like this, you may enjoy Jeff Noon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Neuromancer, William Gibson’s first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer -- Brunner's Shockwave Rider form 1974 comes to mind (and is a pretty interesting and strangely timely read, given that it is almost 50 years old).
Shockwave Rider is interesting because of how early it was and how unique at the time. That doesn't establish a subgenre though. Cyberpunk wasn't coined as a term until right around the same time as Neuromancer came out and Neuromancer swept the big sci-fi awards, making it a fair thing to say that it 'helped to establish'.
Neuromancer, William Gibson’s first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction: a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use. I recently re-read it and was struck by how things have turned out differ…
Gibson’s future just may not have happened yet. In the ‘50s our sci-fi showed rockets landing in the same manner (in reverse) that they launched, and it’s slowly becoming a thing now. Some things, like people living in space or AI, were always obvious and easy to predict. Some things were strangely overlooked (cellphones).
I just finished the audiobook of Neuromancer a week ago, and I didn't really enjoy it. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it. I love other what I think of as similar books like Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I had high hopes for Neuromancer, which maybe that was part of it, but I just didn't enjoy it. It kind of turned into a slog and I nearly gave up at around 90%, but just pushed through because I…
I just finished the audiobook of Neuromancer a week ago, and I didn't really enjoy it. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it. I love other what I think of as similar books like Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I had high hopes for Neuromancer, which maybe that was part of it, but I just didn't enjoy it. It kind of turned into a slog and I nearly gave up at around 90%, but just pushed through because I…
For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all.
I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.)
To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book was released in 1984. Could it be that his descriptions of tech were just true to the times? I imagine his stylistic embellishments were also important in the same way older movies about technology (e.g. Hackers[0]) stylize digital events. [0]: https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69
It was routinely criticized as not being true to IT when it came out.