Sci-Fi Noir - 3 1/2 Stars

books:


	• Neuromancer William Gibson Ace Hardcover, 2004 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 451 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

groundbreaking

Cutting edge for its time, inspiration of many books and movies (Matrix anyone?), artificial intelligence conspiracies, Rasta in space. Need I say more?

Fast paced, dark sci-fi

Neuromancer is THE archetypal cyber-punk sci-fi. Fast paced, sometimes funny, sometimes (very) dark - not always clear but nevertheless - one cannot put it down. A true immersing experience in the genre.

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Past Page 25 ...

Adapted from ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com

The first time I tried to read Neuromancer, I stopped around page 25.

I was about 15 years old and I'd heard it was a classic, a must-read from 1984. So I picked it up and I plowed through the first chapter, scratching my head the whole time. Then I shoved it onto my bookshelf, where it was quickly forgotten. It was a dense, multilayered read, requiring more effort than a hormone-addled adolescent wanted to give. But few years later, I pulled the book down and gave it another chance. This time, William Gibson's dystopic rabbit hole swallowed me whole.

Neuromancer is basically a futuristic crime caper. The main character is Case, a burnt-out hacker, a cyberthief. When the book opens, a disgruntled employer has irrevocably destroyed parts of his nervous system with a mycotoxin, meaning he can't jack into the matrix, an abstract representation of earth's computer network. Then he receives a suspiciously sweet offer: A mysterious employer will fix him up if he'll sign on for a special job. He cautiously agrees and finds himself joined by a schizophrenic ex-Special Forces colonel; a perverse performance artist who wrecks havoc with his holographic imaginings; a long-dead mentor whose personality has been encoded as a ROM construct; and a nubile mercenary with silver lenses implanted over her eyes, retractable razors beneath her fingernails and one heckuva chip on her shoulder. Case soon learns that the target he's supposed to crack and his employer and are one and the same -- an artificial intelligence named Wintermute.

Unlike most crime thrillers and many works of speculative fiction, Neuromancer is interested in a whole lot more that plot development. Gibson famously coined the word "cyberspace" and he imagines a world where continents are ruled more by corporations and crime syndicates than nations, where cultural trends both ancient and modern dwell side by side, where high-tech and biotech miracles are as ordinary as air. On one page you'll find a discussion of nerve splicing, on another a description of an open-air market in Istanbul. An African sailor with tribal scars on his face might meet a Japanese corporate drone implanted with microprocessors, the better to measure the mutagen in his bloodstream. When he's not plumbing the future, Gibson dips into weighty themes such as the nature of love, what drives people toward self-destruction and mind/body dualism. It's a rich, heady blend.

That complexity translates over to the novel's prose style, which is why I suspect my first effort to read it failed. Gibson peppers his paragraphs with allusions to Asian geography and Rastafarianism, computer programming and corporate finance. He writes about subjects ranging from drug addiction and zero-gravity physics to synesthesia and brutal back-alley violence. And he writes with next to no exposition. You aren't told that Case grew up in the Sprawl, which is the nickname for the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a concreted strip of the Eastern Seaboard, and that he began training in Miami to become a cowboy, which is slang for a cyberspace hacker, and that he was immensely skilled at it, et cetera, et cetera. No, you're thrust right into Case's shoes as he swills rice beer in Japan and pops amphetamines and tries to con the underworld in killing him when his back is turned because he thinks he'll never work again. You have to piece together the rest on your own.

Challenging? You bet. But it's electrifying once you get it.

I've worked by paperback copy until the spine and cover have split, until the pages have faded like old newsprint. Echoes of its diction sound in my own writing. Thoughts of Chiba City or BAMA pop into my head when I walk through the mall and hear a mélange of voices speaking in Spanish and English and Creole and German. Neuromancer is in me like a tea bag, flavoring my life, and I can't imagine what it would be like if I hadn't pressed on into page 26.

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Neuromancer

If you search for an interesting book about IW (Information Warfare), you shuold by this one!
Neuromancer

Sci-Fi Noir - 3 1/2 Stars

I would have been far too young to read 'Neuromancer' when it was first published. My entire life has included, if not revolved around, the emerging technologies that inspired Mr. Gibson. This perspective profoundly shifts my understanding of 'Neuromancer.'

'Neuromancer,' winner of the three major prizes for Sci-Fi, gets great (and deserved) credit here on Amazon for originating the 'Cyber-punk' sub-genre. As someone who reads and enjoys Sci-Fi from time to time, this is really less important to me than how 'Neuromancer' reads now. To figure that out, we must look at 'Neuromancer' as what it is - a work of Science Fiction.

Like all (or at least most) Science Fiction, the characters and plot of 'Neuromancer' are merely vehichles that allow the author to provide a vision of the future, critiquing the present society from which the author extrapolated his vision. Mr. Gibson's present (when he wrote 'Neuromacer') is far different from the one that readers now inhabit. Paying attention to the divergences was by far the most interesting part of the novel.

Mr. Gibson's future must have dazzled readers in 1984. The Cold War got hot, then ended - perhaps not in the way that readers may have wanted. Technology has infected every part life, including the brain. Cyberspace, virtual reality, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, orbiting resort 'islands' and bionic enhancement were wild flights of fancy.

But here I am, sitting at my 'deck,' jacked into the matrix. Hackers want to steal your identity, not do an end-run around Soviet defenses. Purely man-made genomes are in the news and Lasik eye surgey ads run on the radio. Heck, Amazon even knows what kinds of books I like.

Gibson's future is also a purely wired world. Our orbiting space resort doesn't have wireless. Nobody has cell phones.

So a few of Gibson's projections veered slightly from the path that reality has taken. Others haven't. 'Neuromancer' gives us a world of violent terrorists, unchecked multi-national companies running government, and the a world of weakened superpowers.

The plot is classic Noir in cyber punk clothes. As with most Sci-Fi, the characters are rather flat. The writing paints a vivid picture of the future, which is the whole point of the book, so the thinness of the plot and character seems less of a problem.

As long as you remember that the 'future world' of Mr. Gibson's novel is both the star and the point of the work, you will find 'Neuromancer' a fun read.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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