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A review by millennial_dandy
Neuromancer by William Gibson
3.0
3.5 --> it gets an extra .5 just for the novetly of of having made me feel so gosh-darn disoriented.
The best way I can summarize my reading experience of 'Neuromancer' is to ask you to imagine going back in time and presenting a pre-internet reader with a book that heavily features internet-use. I now understand how that would feel having finished this novel.
From what I've read about this novel, it's widely considered to be 'difficult.' One Youtube reviewer, TheBookchemist , made a soft comparison to some of the works of Thomas Pynchon. Having never reading anything by Pynchon I can only take his word for it, but if reading Pynchon leaves one scratching their head over a passage and thinking to themselves 'well, those sure are all words on that there page' then the comparison is probably apt.
There were long, long stretches -- entire pages-- where I, frankly, had no idea what was going on. Not because the sentences were long and riddled with commas and semi-colons, but because I simply lacked the vocabulary needed to vizualize the action.
Now, we quickly realize through a lot of showing what 'simstim' is, just as over the course of a lot of showing we can get an understanding of what 'breaking ice' constitutes within cyberspace. But visualize any of it? Nah. Not the technology, and much less the 'experience' of being 'jacked in.'
Granted, the idea of these types of technologies isn't so outside a modern reader's frame of reference that I couldn't relax into a vague understanding of 'the matrix' being the ability to go 'inside' what we would call websites or data streams.
Not that I can actually picture what being 'inside' a data stream would be like as an experience, but I can imagine that I can imagine it. Those poor readers from 1984, though. I have no idea how any of them got through this, much less how Gibson came up with it. Kudos to him.
Does this ignite some deep interest in cyberpunk? Not for me. It hits all the points I dislike in Sci-fi and high fantasy, mainly that half or more of the experience is meant to be this puzzle-piecing together of what exactly 'x' or 'y' is, how it works, etc. I've just never been a fan of worldbuilding-based fiction, and this just kind of confirms for me that liminal fantasy and sci-fi is the realm I'll likely stay in.
That being said, if you are a fan of cyberpunk as an aesthetic, or just a fan of immersive sci-fi in general, I can imagine this being a very important book within that canon to be familiar with, and maybe also one you'd like.
The best way I can summarize my reading experience of 'Neuromancer' is to ask you to imagine going back in time and presenting a pre-internet reader with a book that heavily features internet-use. I now understand how that would feel having finished this novel.
From what I've read about this novel, it's widely considered to be 'difficult.' One Youtube reviewer, TheBookchemist , made a soft comparison to some of the works of Thomas Pynchon. Having never reading anything by Pynchon I can only take his word for it, but if reading Pynchon leaves one scratching their head over a passage and thinking to themselves 'well, those sure are all words on that there page' then the comparison is probably apt.
There were long, long stretches -- entire pages-- where I, frankly, had no idea what was going on. Not because the sentences were long and riddled with commas and semi-colons, but because I simply lacked the vocabulary needed to vizualize the action.
Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight [...] Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium [...] but the simstim itself struck him as a gratuitious multiplication of flesh input. [...] The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiberoptics.
Now, we quickly realize through a lot of showing what 'simstim' is, just as over the course of a lot of showing we can get an understanding of what 'breaking ice' constitutes within cyberspace. But visualize any of it? Nah. Not the technology, and much less the 'experience' of being 'jacked in.'
Granted, the idea of these types of technologies isn't so outside a modern reader's frame of reference that I couldn't relax into a vague understanding of 'the matrix' being the ability to go 'inside' what we would call websites or data streams.
Not that I can actually picture what being 'inside' a data stream would be like as an experience, but I can imagine that I can imagine it. Those poor readers from 1984, though. I have no idea how any of them got through this, much less how Gibson came up with it. Kudos to him.
Does this ignite some deep interest in cyberpunk? Not for me. It hits all the points I dislike in Sci-fi and high fantasy, mainly that half or more of the experience is meant to be this puzzle-piecing together of what exactly 'x' or 'y' is, how it works, etc. I've just never been a fan of worldbuilding-based fiction, and this just kind of confirms for me that liminal fantasy and sci-fi is the realm I'll likely stay in.
That being said, if you are a fan of cyberpunk as an aesthetic, or just a fan of immersive sci-fi in general, I can imagine this being a very important book within that canon to be familiar with, and maybe also one you'd like.