Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

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

It's a funny coincidence, I've never read Neuromancer, and talking with a friend of mine three days ago he said, "I thought we read Neuromancer at the same time and discussed it? You should really read it now!"

I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.

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 McGuffin that the mysterious man with unlimited financial resources needs. It's creaky, but works despite its McGuffin-chasing adventure caper aspect because it's so well written and Case becomes a proxy for the reader, allowing us to observe the plot from a relative outsider's POV, and enjoy all the fantastic sci-fi world building.

But then if you read more Gibson, you will come to realize every single Gibson plot is like that. It's always a mysterious man (always a man!) with apparently unlimited resources who needs to hire someone, usually a ragtag group of specialists, to obtain a McGuffin, usually under false pretenses. Sometimes the group is on the run, but the protagonists invariably end up passive observers in an Easter egg hunt (with the possible exception of Turner in Count Zero) and are generally being manipulated into doing what they do. I think the most egregious example of this is The Peripheral, where the heroine does absolutely nothing; it's a classic witness protection plot where the main character is just a pawn, moved around for safety or as bait, while observing as things happen to her. The sequel, Agency, has an ironic title given that the heroine does even less and appears to have no agency at all.

Once you realize the basic skeleton of a Gibson plot, you come to appreciate how well the world building hides it, but it's clear he ran out of ideas quickly after his first book. The two Neuromancer sequels had a bunch of action but were once again about McGuffins and behind-the-scenes manipulation. The Bridge novels is another McGuffin hunt with lower stakes. The Blue Ant books even more so. With The Peripheral he seemed to be trying at something completely new, but ended up stuck in the same mold, parallel universes being used to uncover the identity of someone pulling McGuffins from behind the scenes once again. A not-terrible but old-fashioned sci-fi idea well executed, but little more than a potboiler. Agency was awful.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I've come to the conclusion that Neuromancer was Gibson's one good idea, and while his execution — world building and prose and so on — has been top notch throughout, every book has been weaker than the last. I had to look up his post-Bridge books on Wikipedia to even remember what they were really about. There are occasional glimmers (the Burning Chrome collection is fantastic), and none of his books are not enjoyable on some level. But when I look at the wonderful works of contemporaneous authors like Iain Banks, Gibson doesn't measure up. Banks is an apt comparison, I think, because like Gibson his books are also immensely plot-driven and McGuffin-based, and often lean on similar themes, but with very different results.

I do love Gibson's dense, beautiful prose, and will read anything he writes just for the pleasure of it, so there's still that.

Eh, that is a take but hetero normative sex still sells lots of porn subscriptions today and depictions of queer sex in media only feel novel because it was so heavily disallowed in the past. Whereas hetero normative sex hardly appears in movies or tv anymore because it's boring to watch actors pretending to have sex when you can see the real thing effortlessly.

Honestly though that paragraph does have meaning to it. Simstim is a thing. Is it a quite adventurous description of it? You may not "fully" get the description at times. However I never read it and went "This is garbage."

In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.