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Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

skmurphy.com

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Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#71

Post by snowwrestler »

phobosdeimos wrote: post #66
archagon wrote: post #17

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…

I think Neuromancer aged better than a lot of sci fi. Gibson didn't go into technical details, which is a blessing when you deal with early 80s computer tech. Incidentally a lot of cyberpunk feels off in 2018. Nobody seemed to forecast the rise of China.

In general, a lot of well-known cyberpunk seems to have underestimated governments--their competence, power, longevity, and reach.

China features prominently in The Diamond Age as a location, but not as a powerful, cohesive, oppressive, incredibly successful authoritarian government. It's sort of a laughing stock in Snow Crash, and barely present in Neuromancer.

Despite its reputation for being darkly cynical, I think we can look back now and see that cyberpunk as a genre was essentially optimistic about the power of computing technology--optimistic that it would indeed radically change power structures, society, and our relationship with governments.

Instead what we see today is not that different from this time 100 years ago: super rich oligarchs controlling much of the economy, rising racism and bigotry, authoritarians using new technologies to seize power and splinter their opposition.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#72

Post by blacksmith_tb »

archagon wrote: post #17

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…

Gibson is a much better prose stylist than most of his SF-writing peers. Neuromancer shows his influences off pretty clearly (Robert Stone, William Burroughs, and a healthy dose of noir a la Hammett and Chandler), but cooks the resulting gumbo into something remarkable.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#73

Post by jefurii »

eropple wrote: post #43
atombender wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 excelle…

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

Interesting. I've seen him twice at book signings and both times he said that he specifically does not plot beforehand. He starts with characters and "follows" them through the story. He did say he often ends up at a certain in the novel where he has to chart out what's going on so he can finish though. On the other hand, if I remember correctly he's said he's a fan of old-school pulp sci-fi which has a lot of plotting and he's perfectly fine with that even if it offends lit-crit types.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#74

Post by jhayward »

kasey_junk wrote: post #36
jhayward wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I recall, and I read it within months of release. Can you point to some contemporaneous reviews or critiques that do so?

The literary critiques & reviews were hugely positive about Neuromancer, but its a fairly common take down of the book how bad the technology pieces are. Here is an interview with Gibson where he talks about it: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/ (For the record he talks about it in agreement, he thinks he himself could write a good takedown of the technology).

Thanks for that interview link. Note that it was almost 30 years after publication.

I suppose a critique of "not sufficiently prescient" is supported by it, but "known at the time of publication that it got the IT wrong", which is what I think the GP was saying, isn't.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#75

Post by armitron »

feral wrote: post #64

> The Neuromancer AI made a copy of Case to keep its copy of dead Linda company: A small detail - while it's left ambiguous, FWIW I always thought that was Dixie, not a copy of Case. That's why Case hears Dixie's laughter at the very end; earlier Dixie disappears and Neuromancer says he got more than his wish; later, Case asks where Dixie is and Wintermute/Neuromancer says its kind of hard to explain. This makes the…

There is no ambiguity:

"Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself."

It's hinted (in the next two books) that the construct merged with the AI and is part of the Loa phenomenon.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#76

Post by zlynx »

Sangermaine wrote: post #60
atombender wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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; I see this as a nod to old detective pulp novels and film noir which often have these kind of plots: a mysterious backer (sometimes a rich man, sometimes a femme fatale) sends a detective on a mission to find something or someone. Over the cou…

It's such a cyberpunk trope that in pretty much every RPG I've played in or heard of set in Cyberpunk or Shadowrun, everyone knows not to trust the client.

It's actually a surprise when they don't betray you. And if they follow through on the contract, you're only waiting for when they'll have lulled you into complacency and then turn on you.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#77

Post by armitron »

pmoriarty wrote: post #26

Neuromancer started it all, but I've always found Count Zero to be by far the best book in the trilogy.

I find that while Neuromancer lays on the atmosphere heavy from the beginning, Count Zero is all about insinuations and implications. Kinda like Dune in that regard. This doesn't take anything away, but it means that it's not as in-your-face as Neuromancer. It's a more intuitive book.

The concepts and ideas are as iconoclastic as ever but one needs a keen eye and ideally personal experience in order to fully appreciate them. None of the sprawl trilogy novels are geared towards angry teenagers, they're layered with almost transcendental meaning that works on multiple levels.

An example: The Loa "riding" as the transmigration of traditional mystical experiences (possession/psychosis) into the digital domain. Anyone that's ever crossed the threshold will recognize innumerable similarities in Gibson's descriptions.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#78

Post by krapp »

electricslpnsld wrote: post #12
skmurphy wrote: post #2

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…

> 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).

>Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer (...)

Interestingly, the movie Blade Runner hit theaters before William Gibson had finished writing Neuromancer. When he saw the movie, he was afraid people would think that he ripped off the movie's aesthetic. [0,1] Most people would probably assume the movie was influenced by the book, but the movie almost killed the book.

[0]https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-did-william-gibson-really-feel-a...

[1]http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_01_01_archive.as...

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#79

Post by feral »

armitron wrote: post #75
feral wrote: post #64

> The Neuromancer AI made a copy of Case to keep its copy of dead Linda company: A small detail - while it's left ambiguous, FWIW I always thought that was Dixie, not a copy of Case. That's why Case hears Dixie's laughter at the very end; earlier Dixie disappears and Neuromancer says he got more than his wish; later, Case asks where Dixie is and Wintermute/Neuromancer says its kind of hard to explain. This makes the…

There is no ambiguity: "Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself." It's hinted (in the next two books) that the construct merged with the AI and is part of the Loa phenomenon.

Yeah; but I thought that was Dixie in Case's 'body', presumably so Linda thought it was Case. I.e. Dixie steals his identity in Neuromancer's virtual world. That wouldn't preclude the merge; if anything the merge precludes the construct being deleted.

Maybe not.

Re: Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

#80

Post by bitwize »

pmoriarty wrote: post #59
bitwize wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they would have been a bit player in the OS marketplace compared to Windows NT. Assuming that in this alternate timeline, the Apple-NeXT merger still happens, the dominant Unix flavor would likely be macOS. As it is, it's still alive and kicking and enjoying a comfortable number two spot (number one if you're talking desktop installs).

I'm talking about servers, where Linux dominates. Sun used to dominate there, and they might have continued to do so had they switched to open licensing, made the OS free, and maybe adopted a business model like RedHat's.

If it hadn't been for Linux, Windows NT would have dominated the server market too.
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