Neuromancer by William Gibson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Neuromancer
Book Review: Old Cyberpunk Still Stands Up
Summary: 4 Stars
I recently reread this book and was suprised at how well it has stood up to the test of time. Despite being so rooted in technology, which changes with a speed few writers could keep up with, it's about technological concepts, not specific devices. Those concepts have remained consistent while the tech has matured and developed to our present-day standard. Also, the characters are whole personalities full of edges, hindrances, and quirks. These human standards are eternal and are as valid today as any time in history.Book Review: Past Page 25 ...
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Read it for what it is, not for what it isn't
Summary: 5 Stars
Clearly, there are people who don't like this book. That's fine; far be it from me to dictate to people what they should or should not enjoy. But I have been consistently flabbergasted to hear peoples' reasons for not liking it. That it's too dense and uses too much jargon is a complaint that sounds like it was opined by a lazy 13-year-old. That the characterization is shallow is a complaint that sounds like someone who reads a cookbook and then complains that the characters are obsessed with food. You're missing the point. You want characterization that's easy to locate and define? Read Dickens. You want a sour, gritty, dystopian vision of the future and characterization that isn't spoon-fed to you? Read Gibson. Stop comparing his writing to all the other cyberpunk writers out there. Stop thinking of it as cyberpunk at all, and look instead to the warning tone of the author: this is what is happening to the world. The question of genre is an academic one that certainly has its place in educational and literary circles - but to try to categorize or pigeonhole this book is a profligate waste of time. Stop being lazy about it and force yourself to try to understand what Gibson is trying to say, because not only is it possible to grasp every single word of the story, but it's also important to do so. Watch the characters as they seek redemption without even being aware of it. Experience the texture of the writing. It's all there, for those who are willing to put in the effort.Book Review: Sci-Fi Noir - 3 1/2 Stars
Summary: 3 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.
Book Review: Should be part of every science-fiction lovers' collection
Summary: 4 Stars
This book has been shuffled around on my ever-expanding bookshelf for a number of years, but recently seeing my roommate reading Asimov's "I, Robot" whetted my appetite for the surreal intellectual indulgence that science fiction represents. William Gibson's "Neuromancer" sated that appetite very well, and I feel satisfied, and, in fact, rather interested to read more of his work.
Most anyone familiar with the Matrix Trilogy, Blade Runner and other futuristic sci-fi blockbusters will feel right at home in Chiba City and the Sprawl, the neon-scrawled megalopolises buzzing with cryptic technologies and high-tech crimes, in which Neuromancer is set. Case, a freelance hacker with a taste for alcohol and futuristic drugs, has a disposition that seems to have become something of a norm in the genre - world-weary, aloof, and vaguely anti-establishmentarian. The plot unfolds at a brisk pace, and we follow Case through a wide variety of this dystopian Earth's dark alleys, into low orbit aboard a city-sized space-capsule, and, importantly and fascinatingly, into the bleak expanses of darkness and glittering neon chasms of digital information as he punches in on his Ono-Sendai terminal to experience a virtual reality computer-interface called the matrix.
Although Case is the main character, the real star of the show is Wintermute - an advanced, self-aware artificial intelligence conceived to govern the goings-on of a corporate conglomerate known as Tessier-Ashpool. Wintermute, we begin to learn, is the (digitalized) mind behind the character's mission, a kind of puppet-master operating from the vast blackness of the computer world.
William Gibson popularized a wide swath of the computer-based lexicon that we now take for granted such as "artificial intelligence" and the "matrix." What's so impressive about this novel, and why I would recommend it to those, not just with an interest in technology, but also about human nature, is that Gibson didn't stop at just creating a fantastically vivid world of high-tech super hackers. He used Wintermute, a sentient being of human design, to call into question the nature of perception and subjective reality. By the stories' end, the reader has been exposed to issues that causes them to ask questions like, "What is real?" and "Would I choose to live an eternity of happiness if I knew it wasn't real?" and, that now ubiquitous question, "Am I already part of the matrix?" By today's standards, this may all be misinterpreted as prosaic, even cliché. Yet this book was written in 1983, many years before Keanu Reeves was dodging bullets.
Neuromancer is a highly valuable piece of literature, both in historical context, and for its creative richness and narrative complexity and should be a part of every science-fiction lovers' collection.