Neuromancer was a novel that I knew was assigned reading in some Humanities courses, and this is what led me to want to read it. It wasn't held in the print collection of my library so I checked it out on audiobook.
Listening to Neuromancer as an audiobook is especially difficult because it makes the story that much harder to follow; Gibson is given to abrupt juxtapositions and changes of scene. The psychedelia of some of his images and scenes are drawn with higher contrast because of those abrupt juxtapositions, I think.
The impression listening to the audiobook gave me was of being surrounded by radio theater. I found the book dark and I felt unable to escape from its darkness and perhaps unwelcomely influenced by the "tough guy/street tough" character of Case.
This book was published in 1984 and it has a cinematic quality that reminds me of Bladerunner and Black Rain; in fact, parts of the beginning of the novel are set in a future Japan, a place where black market transplants, surgically implanted prostheses and plastic surgery are commonplace.
His protagonist, Case, is a "cowboy" (data thief, or in today's parlance, a hacker) and a drug addict with a strong self-destructive impulse. Just when he's scraped bottom, he's rescued by a mysterious man named Armitage who is accompanied by a Yakuza enforcer named Molly who has mirror shades for eyes and steel fingers that extrude from underneath her fingernails like Wolverine.
Armitage's goals are mysterious and he takes Case to a variety of settings: the "Sprawl," a megalopolis that extends from New York to Atlanta; Istanbul; Japan again and other places I can't remember. Case's whole world is a port city full of strangers from faraway places thrown together.
I read this book in part because I wanted to try to understand the genre of "cyberpunk," which this novel is said to have begun; while Case is clearly a hacker and his life is influenced by living in a world, both in cyberspace (a term said to have been coined by Gibson) and in the real world of foreigners shorn of nationality, there are elements of fantasy and metaphysics that seem out of place in a world in which technology has given both freedom and rootlessness.
The audiobook contained both an introduction by the author and an afterword by an author, unknown to me, who described himself as a friend of Gibson's as well as a fellow Virginian, and who argued that the novel is suffused with a sense of an Appalachian past. I'm not quite able to see all of his point but I have to agree that there is something about the novel, that I can't quite put my finger on, that points to the past as well as the present.
There's a interesting and brief discussion of the impact that Neuromancer had when published and its relation to the development of the Internet at schmoop: http://www.shmoop.com/neuromancer.
I realized what Neuromancer reminds me of, finally - The Maltese Falcon. The novel opens in a bar in Japan, I think in Chiba City (I don't really remember). The bartender is a Russian who makes little observations about Case who's a has-been addict but manages to cushion the barb with his obscure metaphors. (I like Quentin Tarantino to direct.)
Listening to Neuromancer as an audiobook is especially difficult because it makes the story that much harder to follow; Gibson is given to abrupt juxtapositions and changes of scene. The psychedelia of some of his images and scenes are drawn with higher contrast because of those abrupt juxtapositions, I think.
The impression listening to the audiobook gave me was of being surrounded by radio theater. I found the book dark and I felt unable to escape from its darkness and perhaps unwelcomely influenced by the "tough guy/street tough" character of Case.
This book was published in 1984 and it has a cinematic quality that reminds me of Bladerunner and Black Rain; in fact, parts of the beginning of the novel are set in a future Japan, a place where black market transplants, surgically implanted prostheses and plastic surgery are commonplace.
His protagonist, Case, is a "cowboy" (data thief, or in today's parlance, a hacker) and a drug addict with a strong self-destructive impulse. Just when he's scraped bottom, he's rescued by a mysterious man named Armitage who is accompanied by a Yakuza enforcer named Molly who has mirror shades for eyes and steel fingers that extrude from underneath her fingernails like Wolverine.
Armitage's goals are mysterious and he takes Case to a variety of settings: the "Sprawl," a megalopolis that extends from New York to Atlanta; Istanbul; Japan again and other places I can't remember. Case's whole world is a port city full of strangers from faraway places thrown together.
I read this book in part because I wanted to try to understand the genre of "cyberpunk," which this novel is said to have begun; while Case is clearly a hacker and his life is influenced by living in a world, both in cyberspace (a term said to have been coined by Gibson) and in the real world of foreigners shorn of nationality, there are elements of fantasy and metaphysics that seem out of place in a world in which technology has given both freedom and rootlessness.
The audiobook contained both an introduction by the author and an afterword by an author, unknown to me, who described himself as a friend of Gibson's as well as a fellow Virginian, and who argued that the novel is suffused with a sense of an Appalachian past. I'm not quite able to see all of his point but I have to agree that there is something about the novel, that I can't quite put my finger on, that points to the past as well as the present.
There's a interesting and brief discussion of the impact that Neuromancer had when published and its relation to the development of the Internet at schmoop: http://www.shmoop.com/neuromancer.
I realized what Neuromancer reminds me of, finally - The Maltese Falcon. The novel opens in a bar in Japan, I think in Chiba City (I don't really remember). The bartender is a Russian who makes little observations about Case who's a has-been addict but manages to cushion the barb with his obscure metaphors. (I like Quentin Tarantino to direct.)
