 |
| **1/2 Stars |
It is with zero satisfaction that I have discovered that Neuromancer is not particularly good. I’ll speculate and say that the advent of post-modernism has allowed this book - which is very big on ideas and very short on execution - to be given the attention that is has. The narrative is barely coherent and I found it a slog to get through despite its meagre 320 pages. A mixture of genius and playful but abstruse musings. Basically, POMO. I say all this in the context of William Gibson’s own acknowledgement that producing this book was barely an enjoyable experience. He felt he was an emerging writer and the life of the book post-production surprised him. It went on to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Hugo Award.
I appreciate Gibson's thoughts on this book and give him a lot of respect for his honesty. I will also fess up and let you know that I am being a hypocrite by saying this. I have little patience for authors who try to justify themselves after a work is published. Michael Crichton’s defending of Rising Sun is an especially good example of this. The work needs to stand alone and for Crichton and Gibson this is not the case for either of these books. Nonetheless, Gibson’s reflections are imbued with humbleness and a grappling to understand what Neuromancer is and what is has meant to him while Crichton’s responses always seemed strident and didactic.
Big ideas in this book involve thinking about how emerging technologies could interact with each other (artificial intelligences, virtual reality and what we now call the Internet). Through the journey Gibson's sense of wonder about this is multitudinous and he never runs out of ideas about the implications of this future world. For instance, this line “He smelled boiled vegetables from a vendor’s pushcart.” Maybe this does not sound like much but in this line Gibson is working hard on his concept. In this moment he head fakes us, suggesting we are back in the real world while the protagonist is actually still inside a virtual one. There are dozens of nuances like this in the book which demonstrate how much imagining Gibson had done. While virtual reality is an aged idea today the artful way he brings it to life in this book (e.g. drawing on - the frequently forgotten - olfactory senses) is still to be admired.
If someone was going to be less flattering about this book they could point out that artificial intelligence, computers and dystopian futures were rife in the 1980s. All you have to do is look to popular culture. B-grade flicks like Maximum Overdrive and (tipping the cap again to Michael Crichton) Runaway as well as Tron, Blade Runner and Terminator. Thinking about the possibilities of technology, the question of whether or not our own creations will destroy us and their ability to transform our consciousness was not as progressive as some might lead you to believe.
Finally, Gibson is given credit for coining “cyberspace” and “the matrix” which sounds pretty impressive but is something I am happy to challenge. Gibson has a lot of fun in this book with language. Every character has an idiosyncratic way of speaking. On top of that he also created an entire dialect (which is impressive) to articulate what hacking computers in the future will be like. What this amounts to is dozens of neologisms and invented slang throughout the story. Given the uptake of this book by readers one of the many, many terms he created had to stick at some point. I am surprised “Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE)" did not make into our day-to-day vocabulary as it is a term that gets used a lot throughout the book.
The accolades that Neuromancer has received, its shelf life and its sheer ambition are things that you cannot argue with. Really this book is equal parts visionary, world building and hard science. Nothing short of impressive. However, in terms of an immersive and enjoyable read I cannot recommend it. The writing is too fragmented and the plot hidden beneath an unwieldy bulk of jargon and invented dialect. In a nutshell, not as fun as I wanted it to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment