Goodreads Is Broken

Post by lsc » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 12:16 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #265

angry_octet wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to what aspects seemed cliched. What earlier works are you talking about? I thought I'd read them all...

It’s been a while but ... The focus on cyborgs a year after The Six Million Dollar Man TV show kind if shows how much a product of the times it was. But, that’s the surface. The way it portrayed both hacking and brain machine interfaces was wildly off base and basically copied from other science fiction. Virtual reality for example goes back to 1933. Main character being a druggy is fairly common in that time period,…

>Granted I prefer hard sci-fi, but the novel’s focus is really on style over science fiction. It’s IMO somewhere between space opera and fantasy.

How I looked at Gibson's work changed completely after I read "pattern recognition" when it came out in my early '20s - It was very explicitly about style, and I went back and re-read the older stuff which I read as a child, and yeah, you could also say that neuromancer is about style and fashion. It was interesting just how much reading the later book changed how I thought about the earlier books.

(Note, I still really enjoy Gibson.)

Post by lsc » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 12:19 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #226

elorant wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, name five other books which are like Neuromancer and you liked them. I'll try one or two of them, if I haven't read them already. Incidentally I've read a lot of Gibson's books and Neuromancer was the one I liked the least. Probably because it was his first and not as polished as the rest. Or perhaps because by today's standards the cyber warfare he's describing sounds ludicrous. I do like his cyberpunk atmospher…

I've never actually read Neuromancer, but Alexander Jablokov wrote some novels similar to what I imagine Neuromancer is like. For example, Nimbus and A Deeper Sea. Near future written in the early 90s.

Huh. It wouldn't occur to me, really, to connect the two, but I also am a huge fan of Jablokov.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

Re: Goodreads Is Broken