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Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

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Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#161

Post by plq »

jfengel wrote: post #140
macleginn wrote: post #50

One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toa…

I find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people. This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.

Ursula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...

EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#162

Post by kstrauser »

cubefox wrote: post #19

Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future, you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new present. Nobody in the future would bot…

Exactly. I imagine something like “he glanced at his phone and saw he didn’t even have LTE”. The author wouldn’t be trying to make you think about the details of modern communication systems. They’d want you to infer that the subject of the sentence was barely on the edge of communications.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#163

Post by solaire_oa »

> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

> static-filled “dead channels.”

I don't think Gibson was referring to static (which is bland grey and not cyberpunk at all). I think he was referring to SMPTE on a "dead channel", which is a colorful skyline reminiscent of Blade Runner. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars

I agree with the author of this article that Neuromancer is a precursor for modern sci-fi, and it serves as inspiration for so much popular culture. But it's a terrible book IMO. The characters are shallow and uninteresting (Cage), the plot is boring (Wintermute), expository dialogue is rattled off without any setup or motivation (the female character explaining her backstory), it's chock full of nonsequiters (shark-head, something about horses being extinct), and new concepts are introduced not because they're engaging but because they're "just so sci-fi bro" (Turning police).

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#164

Post by koverstreet »

jfengel wrote: post #140
macleginn wrote: post #50

One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toa…

I find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people. This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.

Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#165

Post by gerikson »

atombender wrote: post #96

An interesting aspect of Neuromancer again was how obviously perfunctory and mechanical the plot appears when you're not as absorbed by the mystery of what will happen next. It's easy to see that Case is almost entirely a passive observer, only stepping in with his hacker skills for a brief mission in cyberspace, then not doing anything except follow the gang as they travel to a new location to pick up another McGuff…

I think this is a fair analysis, but for me the pleasure of reading Gibson has basically always been the use of language and jargon. Yes, Virtual Light is a stupid caper story but both Chevette and Berry are great characters, hard-luck protagonists trying to make it in a crapsack world. Berry's background is especially deftly told in a few telling vignettes.

That's why the Bigend books are such disappointments to me. Instead of outsiders looking in, or trying to strike it big, we have bougie insiders getting VC money. And Agency is a travesty.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#167

Post by throwaway328 »

I recently stumbled upon Michael Moorcock, by explicitly looking for fantasy authors with "anarchist" (in the original, European sense, not the crypto-bro sense) tendencies. Read an essay, watched a few interviews, will be reading a few books, basically I'm all the better for it. Seems very interesting.

I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading sense of everything being bought and sold and runied and nihilistic in cyberpunk... but I don't know if it feels very political, or rebellious, or revolutionary. I don't mean that critically, art doesn't have to be political. I am curious if there were any overtly anarchist thinkers operating in that space, though.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#168

Post by Espressosaurus »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #92
anton-c wrote: post #91

Necromancer was cool. Never managed to get through the other cyberpunk classic Snowcrash though. Did I get the right book? Pizza delivery?

Just my opinion, but neither were .. revelatory for me. They were both just okay. I'm not really an avid reader though.

If you read Snow Crash before the age of 25 it's revelatory.

If you read it after 25 it's laughably on-the-nose.

In highschool it was the greatest book I ever read.

Some books require the reader to be in a particular place in their lives.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#169

Post by disconcision »

Barrin92 wrote: post #87
pieds wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders. Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is countercul…

>Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. "Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell [1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Gam…

> used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S

to be fair this is explicitly a theme in the (imo unjustly maligned) sequels

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#170

Post by jmyeet »

I was very much alive in the 1980s but for no particular reason I never read Neuromancer at the time. No specific reason I guess other than I never fetishized Japanese culture. I read it back in the 2010s and was... underwhelmed. I see this pattern a lot: a given work is seminal but it doesn't tend to age well. Much of the accolades are based on nostalgia.

Cyberpunk as a genre is inherently both xenophobic and Orientalist [1]. In the context of the 1980s (before 1987 when Japan's bubble popped), this makes perfect sense. There was a genuine fear of the Japanese taking over. Japanese tech companies were at their relative peak. So people both feared and fetishized Japanese culture and products.

Interestingly, I did read Snow Crash when it was published (1992 and that did have a big impact on me. I also think that book is solely responsible for a whole generation of people thinking VR was ever going to be a mainstream thing when in fact the metaverse is fundamentally flawed because of network latency.

To me, cyberpunk was pretty inaccurate. Technology for the longest time was rebellious and hopeful. It's only really in the last decade that tech has turned dystopic. I can actually see a techno-feudalistic future now but it's not at the hands of the Japanese (or, now, the Chinse).

What I guess is interesting is how white supremacy is so pervasive. It certainly underpins cyberpunk.

[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/30/22255318/cyberpunk-2077-ge...

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