I hate this book. I don't want to hate it - in fact I'm making this thread so someone here can shed light on it, and maybe encourage me to reconsider my opinion on it.
But it just seemed to me like someone who really wanted to branch out from their regular pulp and so skimmed some Pynchon, got inspired by what they construed through the LSD blear, and jetted this out in one go. Completely missing, of course, the essential structure of the style they found themselves aping.
I thought this before I learned Gibson was a Pynchon fan, and it's only obvious to me now - in fact, notice the involvement of Devo in the video-game adaptation (Devo also a TP fan, their most famous song an attempt to mimic the lyrics in GR).
Neuromancer is words upon words - high vocab words and made-up jargon - but nothing is said with them, they convolute without expressing, they clash against each other and sink into geeky torpor.
The characters are one-dimensional, it veers from genre-fiction camp to desperate attempts to seem literary and loaded with portents, but Gibson (self-admittedly) knows nothing of the finer workings of the technology he's musing about. He never touched a computer until five years later.
This work is described as important historically, but it seemed to me to be a forerunner not to any real predicted phenomenon in our society, but to the laziness of video-games. The whole book is nothing but a walk through a world where 'neat' things are existing and being 'neat.'
Please, fans, tell me what you got out of it.
>>7799547
I read it by the pool in the summer. I didn't "get" anything out of it except for a brief escapist fantasy, and a need to fuck a neo-punk razor girl.
>>7799600
>p-plug into me anon-chan
>>7799547
As a somewhat older anon, I feel bad for you guys who had so much academic shit poured in your ears in college that you havent figured out how to read for pleasure. Neuromancer is definitely not complex enough to put any sort of analysis into.
>>7799547
not sure if you're up to reading more gibson, but i thought count zero was better in several ways. it's still genre of course but he's learned restraint, has put more thought into sociology.
mona lisa overdrive however was just a cash in.
Literally everyone I've talk to thought this book wasn't nearly as good as it was hyped up to be.
So where does the hype come from then!?
Every time I found myself actually thinking while reading it, finding something interesting, a character would back-track and explain something to death and ruin it for me with exposition or something really overt.
Like that part where the title character stops to explain how the title is three different words in one, and it feels so try-hard, like Gibson is so proud that his title is so loaded - so loaded with meaning that he has to shove down your throat.
>>7799637
neuromancer didn't age well. it was truly unique and interesting when it first came out, but the way technology has progressed and proliferated rendered a lot of its novelties trite and cliche, through no fault of the book itself.
>>7799607
>I feel bad for you guys who had so much academic shit poured in your ears in college that you havent figured out how to read for pleasure
I didn't go to college, in fact I outright object to intellectual indoctrination. Different people find pleasure in different things - I found no pleasure in Neuromancer.
Neuromancer is a lot like a steep hill.
When I first read it, I couldn't get past ten pages before going "Okay, I'm not ready parse out all THIS bullshit."
I left it at that for like 4 years.
Then, I read Idoru, loved it, and gave Neuromancer a second chance. Honestly, I think you're not supposed to completely understand the story until late in the novel. I've read quite a few other Gibson novels (Because once it clicked, it clicked GOOD) and they follow this similar trend of having each chapter be for seemingly unconnected characters, builds each character up slowly, and then there comes a point in the novel where everything converges into a single point, makes sense, and now you're just barreling towards the ending, which you could probably guess at if you're paying attention.
My most favorite part of any reading experience ever was reading Mona Lisa Overdrive and started to figure out Gibson's style and what was going to happen later on. It's really amazing how you slowly dawn on the story, why the characters are doing what they do, and how it's all going to play out.
So give it a chance. I personally love Idoru and Mona Lisa Overdrive the most. I like Burning Chrome and Neuromancer the least (his earlier works seem more impenetrable than his later works, although I haven't read everything by him... yet. I need to read the rest of the Bridge trilogy and the Blue Ant trilogy)
pattern recognition is for my money the best gibson book
ever read Burroughs, specifically Cities of the Red Night?
>>7799547
Are you the one who made the cyberpunk thread? I went ahead and downloaded this from Lainchan afterwords. We'll see what I think. Though I think it's fair to say that something that spearheaded a genre might be difficult for some to appreciate after it's become cliche.
>>7799647
>rendered a lot of its novelties trite and cliche
Sounds fun.
>>7799653
It's not the meaning or what's happening that I'm objecting to - it's the prose itself, I just don't think that he has a real command of language. There are many moments of empty description, characters just doing a string of unimportant minutiae, and lots of phrases are repeated or just clash with the tone of certain sections. It has atmosphere, but the atmosphere is inconsistent. I think some of the ideas were interesting, but the surface-level text itself is sloppy.
>>7799607
haha. funny part is, it's kind of true. speaking anecdotally, it took several years removed from my college experience to get back into reading simply for the pleasure of it and not feeling the need to analyze every single aspect of a novel, including grammar, structure, narrative inconsistencies, etc. mind you, there's a place for that in academia, but i now find all that tedious. to each their own.
Neuromancer is no high intellectual work of literature. however, it's a fun read if you let it be, and i think the narrative jargon the OP criticized the novel for employing actually enhances the reading experience. anyways, that's my two cents.
>>7799690
Making anyone out who doesn't like Neuromancer as a fake academic-type is really presumptuous.
I don't approach any book trying to analyze it academically, to me a book is good if I find myself overwhelmed by it, drawn powerfully in the direction it's trying to take me - which may be emotional, intellectual, escapist, or any mix of those or others. And to me Neuromancer was far more tedious than any 'academic' book. There's nothing more tedious to me than narratives where a main character is being strung along by people who know more than he does, obviously for the sake of filling up pages with action and intrigue so I'm not bored until the inevitable monologues where they explain who was really who all along and what for.
Yeah I didn't like it much either.
Went in expecting something very experimental and 'literary', but the goofy plot and characters totally undermined the atmosphere of seriousness it tried to maintain. Liked some of the prose but mostly it was just an edgy retread of Philip K Dick
>>7799733
Its not presumptuous, OP framed his criticism analytically. Its not like the other thread where the dude is like "Fuck Confederacy of Dunces, it isnt funny".
OP literally criticizes a genre fiction book by attacking its grammar structure. that suggests that he is taking a book that is marketed towards people playing cyberpunk PnP wayyyy to seriously.
>>7799739
Neuromancer shouldn't be barred from criticism just off the token that it's genre-fiction. It seems to me like OP's points all seem like something bad for genre-fiction, ie, an attempt to be more serious and literary than it ultimately is.
>>7799760
>an attempt to be more serious and literary than it ultimately is.
mate, have you read the book? there are blind ninjas, satellite deities, and hooker assassins. Gibson is going fora Blade Runner feel more than seriousness or realism. there's plenty of humor in the book from what i recall.
the stylistic choices Gibson employs in the writing are not an attempt to elevate the seriousness of the novel but to create atmosphere and draw intrepid readers into the narrative. OP dislikes it, many people don't. to each their own.
>>7799547
cyberpunk is amazing and so is neuromancer
>>7799917
I don't recall any humor, and maybe by 'seriousness' I should say it tries to come off as more clever than it is, and definitely as having more of a command over description than it really does.
To each their own? Why the hell are you even discussing anything on a board if it all boils down to relativity? Don't reply then.
Neuromancer is dated.
If you can't enjoy it you've either never watched classic anime or you just weren't a teenager in the 90s (understandable I assume everyone on 4chan is a teenager now).
If you're born in the 70s or early 80s Neuromancer is your wet dream.
If you're born in the 80s or early 90s Pattern Recognition is a more your cup of tea, it basically is early 4chan the novel, and captures that feeling a lot of us had on the internet before everyone else was on it.
If you're born in the 90s and 00s I doubt you will ever find Gibson's work relevant, you could probably get into some transhumanism shit or Ray Kurzweil fantastical nonsense, it's effectively performance science fiction.
Gibson is cyberpunk which is basically pulp near-future sci-fi. Neuromancer is rampant AI's, body implants, cyborgs and mega corporations, there really isn't any depth there, other than a general humans are special because they're human message which most fiction genre regurgitates as its holy mantra.
b but space rastas dude
>>7800450
They just spoke in a white guy's approximation of an accent, that's literally all they did other than be helping hands and say DUDE GANJA LMAO and DUDE DUB LMAO.
Now that cyberpunk is a whole genre mostly built off Neuromancer, I feel like it's easy to miss how much of it is noir. People see 'cyberpunk' and they expect lol hacking the mainframe parkour parkour when Neuromancer is about cigarettes, revolvers, mob bosses, dames, payphones.
I'd take Neuromancer over Snow Crash any day, stylistically and general enjoyment of the genre/tropes/world, etc.
>>7799996
it's dated, that's the fate of all science fiction, but i like retrofuturism. it's adorable.
to be fair, gibson wasn't trying to write anything deep. he himself has said the world he created was one milimeter thick. it's a heist plot plus "futureness"
>>7799934
>more clever than it is
i think here we have a case of blatant reader narcissism. instead of considering you failed to comprehend the narrative style or its attempt at 'cleverness,' as you say, you chide the author for failing to deliver a narrative to your liking.
>Why the hell are you even discussing anything on a board if it all boils down to relativity?
lol. really?
How is Neuromancer hard to read or follow. You are basically crying because it didn't info dump, which is a strong point. You are just dropped in a world where high tech is ubiquitous, and even the people in it don't understand everything about it. That's how you get high tech low life.
1. It's pulp. Pynchon is pulpY but this is the real stuff - you probably won't like it unless you like spy novels, high fantasy, space opera, or the like.
2. It hasn't aged well. Some of this is because other people have copied it, some of it is because real life has copied it to some extent. But it still feels weirdly dated, especially the bad, cartoonish Jamaican patois, which just feels so weird and tone-deaf today.
All that said, I like it. It's fun, the prose is quite good, and it's exciting as hell once Wintermute shows up and startsflying microlights into dudes' torsos and shit.I'm not going to pretend it works on anything much deeper than a visceral level - like exploitation film, pulp novels are probably best not thought about beyond the thrill they give you in the moment. But it's a fun book.
Pattern Recognition is quite a bit better (and not nearly so pulpy) if you ask me, but I may be in the minority on that.
>>7799996
The Illiad is not far from three thousand years old and it's still amazing. To write a book that is so caught up in circumstantial things, lacking any real core just seems like weak writing. Neuromancer could have been written in a way that while the technological parts would feel dated (in the same way that wars fought with swords is dated) it would still have an endearing soul.
Well I started reading it and I fucking love it. Noir pops my boner. I can't wait to catch up with the other stuff I'm reading to dive into this more.
>>7801488
>the Iliad
>not caught up in circumstantial things
>>7801880
Didn't read the post the post.
I would say you lens of comparison is way off. It is better considered in the context of the emergence of cyberpunk, who Gibson was primarily referring to and which is, yes, a pulp in some considerations. But high falutin comparisons to Pynchon is a real stretch both as a text and as a valuation.
As for jargon: its meaningless only if you emotionally tune out. It is only tangentially connected to the real world because Gibson was trying to imagine a self-contained world which did not exist yet and which to some extent has come into existence. You know, what science fiction does. Finer details of technology do not matter in this story: you can tell this from the simple fact that the characters use tech as a drug, not as some finely worked-out machine.
>it seemed to me to be a forerunner not to any real predicted phenomenon in our society, but to the laziness of video-games. The whole book is nothing but a walk through a world where 'neat' things are existing and being 'neat.'
spurious nonsense
>>7799650
>in fact I outright object to intellectual indoctrination
from reading your posts, I find this really hard to believe
>>7799665
Sounds to me like you have the classic issue of someone used to well-written prose reading scifi (most of which isn't well-written), tbphwy. I think most scifi readers either don't read much good writing, or have a very high tolerance for less good writing, so their responses are about things like it being 'dated'- things that wouldn't be an issue if it was well-written.
