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Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

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Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#41

Post by pmoriarty »

kasey_junk wrote: post #20
needz wrote: post #15

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.

I was a huge computer geek when the novel came out in 1984. It completely blew my mind. I absolutely loved it.

Criticizing it for not being "true to IT" was the furthest thing from my mind.

Though I later found out it might not have been quite the first to go there, to me it seemed to herald a paradigm shift in scifi, towards a much grittier, darker future where one could inhabit (or, in a certain sense, commune) with computers. It was kind of like a darker version of Tron, which came out only a couple of years earlier.

Sure, it might not have been like using computers in real life, but it was not pretending to be about the current reality. It was scifi. It was about a possible future.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#42

Post by Gargoyle »

atombender wrote: post #35
electricslpnsld wrote: post #12

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).

Don't forget Alfred Bester. The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man are interesting precursors to Gibson. He also wrote a fantastic, underrated novel that is definitely his most cyberpunk: The Computer Connection (1975), also published as Extro. It's great fun, and at times paints a future even more callous about human life than Gibson ever described (the main character is arguably a serial murderer, even if…

I keep thinking I read Gibson said something along the lines of "Delany's Nova was his attempt to reach the heights of The Stars My Destination, and Neuromancer was my attempt to reach Nova."

But I haven't been able to find it again. Maybe I imagined it.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#43

Post by eropple »

atombender wrote: post #29
linsomniac wrote: post #14

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 read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around. 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 li…

I feel like the biggest criticism I can make of Gibson is that he plots.

Most novels have a plot. But the good ones don't let you in on it. As you say, the characters rush around for MacGuffins, and you characterized it as "creaky"--that's a good word for it. I have not always been the biggest Stephen King fan (as an author; growing up in Maine, I've always been a fan of King-the-person) but On Writing is an excellent book. I don't have my copy right here so I can't quote what he says about plotting (paraphrased: "try not to") but this quote from an interview with Goodreads resonates strongly with me:

"I start a book like Doctor Sleep [his most recent book] knowing just two things: the basic situation and that the story will create its own patterns naturally and organically if I follow it fairly...and by fairly I mean never forcing characters to do things they wouldn't do in real life...For me, the first draft is all about story. I trust that some other part of me—an undermind—will create certain patterns."

So long as your beginnings and ends are only modestly far apart, short stories (and I again agree that Burning Chrome is probably his best work) let you get away with a lot more of this. But novella and novel-length works can't hide the machinery of a plotted-out story as well unless you are inordinately good at it. (And I mean, this is a ding against authors like J.R.R. Tolkien as much as Gibson; it's not like he isn't in good company with this weakness.)

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#44

Post by eropple »

Analemma_ wrote: post #28
linsomniac wrote: post #14

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 think Neuromancer has suffered a lot from what TVTropes calls the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" problem: successive works have borrowed from it so completely that it's difficult to read the book now and get the same effect as when it was published, because it feels so full of cyberpunk cliches. But don't forget that pretty much all those cliches originated here and were totally new at the time.

In terms of milieu and ideas, definitely. But Gibson's plots clank along in pretty much every novel-length work of his I've read. It's a problem of mechanics and storytelling at that point, I think.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#45

Post by pjc50 »

atombender wrote: post #29
linsomniac wrote: post #14

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 read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around. 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 li…

Characterisation is certainly the weak point of a lot of sci-fi. You could make the argument that distancing/alienation is part of the aesthetic, but I'm not expecting that to be very convincing.

Burning Chrome is excellent, but the emotional weight is all dark.

This interview with Wired https://www.wired.com/1999/01/ebay/ actually made Gibson click as a person for me. Especially some of the odder more obsessive thematic details in the novels.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#46

Post by eropple »

kasey_junk wrote: post #20
needz wrote: post #15

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.

At the time, there were also very large parts of "IT" where it was a compiler error to write code while not wearing a shirt and (blue) tie.

Horses for courses, and all that.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#47

Post by sorokod »

kasey_junk wrote: post #31
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brunner is amazing - far ahead of his time.

"Stand on Zanzibar" is one of my favorite books of all times. That said, I think the Shockwave Rider actually holds up less well than Neuromancer, because it was more tuned into the reality of software of its day. Still a great read though.

Now I need to go and reread the Stand on Zanzibar.

- bookworm/assassin

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#48

Post by beat »

atombender wrote: post #29
linsomniac wrote: post #14

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 read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around. 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 li…

I agree with a lot of this. He's said himself that when he got the contract for a novel, he didn't know how to write one, and was kind of panicked about being boring. That's why the first 60 pages or so of the book (through the Sense/Net strike to get the Dixie Flatline's cartridge) is like a nonstop adrenaline rush. It's so exciting! I had no idea science fiction could be like that, the first time I read it.

I strongly agree that his best work was in Burning Chrome. Unfortunately, the only film adaptations of his work we have are two stories from that collection, and they were both awful in different ways. Johnny Mnemonic misses all but the barest outlines of the story - where's Molly? I can't believe they gave up the fight on the "Killing Floor" with Molly vs the vatgrown ninja in favor of blowing up a bridge. Sigh. New Rose Hotel, on the other hand, hewed very close to the original story - which was fine, except the story was only six pages long.

As an aside, I have a band called The Gernsback Continuum, after the short story.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#49

Post by corysama »

I’ll plug the Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territorie...

Gibson is very self-deprecating throughout. He attributes people’s favorite aspects of the Neuromancer to work-arounds he used to cover his inexperience as an author. Meanwhile, the film interleaves interviews with other sci-fi authors who has early access to the book. They all knew the book was something new and special immediately.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#50

Post by bitwize »

wallflower wrote: post #10

In case anyone was perplexed about the end of Neuromancer, this is the answer about what was meant below from William Gibson. > three notes, high and pure. A true name. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive...

I find his discourse on fax machines interesting. I just rewatched Johnny Mnemonic, and a fax machine plays a significant plot role in that film. At the end, J-Bone says "Get your VCRs ready". This despite the writing being quite on the wall for both fax machines and VCRs even in 1995.

Cyberpunk is a bit misnamed, I think, because as expressed by Gibson and his copycats, it's distinctly hipsterish. There's a fondness for the old, a desire to flash-freeze the zeitgeist (usually of the Beat era) so that it could live, in some sense, forever. In Max Headroom, every time we see a computer it has an old manual typewriter (much like the one Gibson used to write Neuromancer on, because to him computers were and still somewhat are alien invaders) for a keyboard.

Strangely, Johnny Mnemonic goes overboard with the technology in other ways: in 2015, let alone 2025, Johnny could have fenced 320 GiB of data at considerably less personal risk by swallowing a toy balloon with Micro SD cards in it.

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