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William Gibson's Neuromancer, the defining work of the cyberpunk genre, gets the SFDebris treatment!

I can't lie, when I saw that Chuck was reviewing this book series song Neuromancer by Battle Beast started playing in my head. Yes, there is song based on this book series.

I tried getting into Neuromancer. It was one of the first audio books I got from Audible... I gave up on it.

I still own it, there are only 5 books that I have returned (out of 160+ titles) and Neuromancer isn't one of those, I just lost interest and never went back.

From Chuck's summaries so far, I feel that Neuromancer still has the same kind of Jargon problem that a lot of bad cyberpunk seems to have.

I got through Neuromancer, but I can't say it did much for me. Not even sure exactly why I didn't enjoy it, but it struck me as the sort of unfortunate pioneering novel that loses the advantage it had-originality and verve- after its popularity inspires/creates a whole new genre. My impression was that it had mediocre, confusing prose, an obscurantist plot, and a kind of indirect action that led to an unsatisfying resolution.

It's possible that it's one of those books that needs to be reread to be appreciated. It definitely requires you to be in a certain frame of mind to get the most out of it.

TGLS wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2019 12:09 pm From Chuck's summaries so far, I feel that Neuromancer still has the same kind of Jargon problem that a lot of bad cyberpunk seems to have.

Not that I recall. The brand-name-dropping occurs, I think (and its another way to convey the corporate domination of society), but not to the same level in others’ later works.

The thing is, Gibson isn’t writing about technology (famously, Neuromancer was written on a typewriter, and he’s confessed to not knowing much if anything about computers when he wrote the book). It’s about the form of the society that’s developed, and people’s responses to that, and how they form their own tight-knit minor societies (the Panther Moderns, the Space Rastas, even Tessier-Ashpool’s reclusiveness). The jargon is explained in context.

I find the Sprawl trilogy (and the later Bridge trilogy) to be more optimistic in tone than a lot of later cyberpunk. The Blue Ant trilogy, on the other hand, was just weird. Especially Zero History.

I do find it interesting how Molly, Case and Hideo became cyberpunk staple archetypes (The razorgirl/street samurai, decker and ninja) but Riviera never really did despite his prominence in the book. Hologram Illusionist never really became a mainstay (And in fact is nearly impossible to actually play in most cyberpunk games).

I imagine the reason is because a lot of cyberpunk takes itself very seriously and Riviera has elements of 'Our team needs a wizard' despite not really being any more magical than the hacking itself.

Probably because a lot of cyberpunk got caught up on the superficial leather-and-mirrorshades look and carrying lots of guns.

Another series I read that focused more on the characters and how they react to society was Jon. Courtenay Grimwood’s first series. That added in an old-world setting (I was never sure if the setting was such that the French, German and Ottoman empires had never fallen or if they were modern revivals) which had a slightly decaying world-weary undertone to the whole thing. An interesting take on the setting, I thought, and it reminds me more of what Gibson was doing than a lot of works that came in between.