Book 04: Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
First line:"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Summary: Case is a freelance hacker, a cowboy who hacks corporate Matrix accounts for the highest bidder. At least he used to be. When he tried to double cross his employers, they left him on his back with irreparable neurological damage. No longer capable of neurally jacking into the Matrix and unable to ply his trade, Case is on the verge of self-destruction when an enigmatic AI approaches with a Faustian bargain. How far will Case go to regain his skills - and how deep will the rabbit hole go?
Reaction: I'm not a visual thinker or reader. I rarely translate verbal descriptions into vibrant images when I read. From the very first sentence, Neuromancer was different. This book is the prototypical cyberpunk tale: It's set amid bleak corporate edifices and seedy neon-tinted bars. It's populated by amoral antiheroes, gangsters, mercenaries, and corporate thugs. It inspired countless novels and movies. The imagery from those movies, I suspect, is what's percolating up from my subconscious as I read. Chiba is full glittering corporate megastructures from Bladerunner. Cowboys inhabit a neon-lit underworld piped out of Hackers. The Matrix is imagined as a sharp-edged virtual world of clean vector graphics - the shiny lines of Tron stretching away into infinity. I'm too young to have experienced 80s sci-fi firsthand. I've seen some of the films and read some of the books. For me, reading Neuromancer was like uncorking a fine vintage - the most memorable images and themes of 1980s sci-fi distilled into one book.
That said, I'm not a huge cyberpunk fan. I much prefer modern hard sci-fi and space opera with transhumanist themes. Coming to the novel without any knowledge of the plot save the cyberpunk genre, I was pleasantly surprised to find both strong AI and human mind digitization/uploading as a means of survival beyond biological death (Neuromancer comes from both "neuro" and "necromancer"). Gibson's treatment of AI is liberal for its time: He does not condemn the computers despite their inhuman natures. It makes for an interesting comparison with Dick's treatment of the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Despite their human traits, those androids' inhumanity is ample justification for their destruction.
I could ramble on for quite some time about this book. It has compelling imagery and a dark story. It also touches on themes and plot elements popular in current sci-fi. Go read it already!
Thumbs: Up
Summary: Case is a freelance hacker, a cowboy who hacks corporate Matrix accounts for the highest bidder. At least he used to be. When he tried to double cross his employers, they left him on his back with irreparable neurological damage. No longer capable of neurally jacking into the Matrix and unable to ply his trade, Case is on the verge of self-destruction when an enigmatic AI approaches with a Faustian bargain. How far will Case go to regain his skills - and how deep will the rabbit hole go?
Reaction: I'm not a visual thinker or reader. I rarely translate verbal descriptions into vibrant images when I read. From the very first sentence, Neuromancer was different. This book is the prototypical cyberpunk tale: It's set amid bleak corporate edifices and seedy neon-tinted bars. It's populated by amoral antiheroes, gangsters, mercenaries, and corporate thugs. It inspired countless novels and movies. The imagery from those movies, I suspect, is what's percolating up from my subconscious as I read. Chiba is full glittering corporate megastructures from Bladerunner. Cowboys inhabit a neon-lit underworld piped out of Hackers. The Matrix is imagined as a sharp-edged virtual world of clean vector graphics - the shiny lines of Tron stretching away into infinity. I'm too young to have experienced 80s sci-fi firsthand. I've seen some of the films and read some of the books. For me, reading Neuromancer was like uncorking a fine vintage - the most memorable images and themes of 1980s sci-fi distilled into one book.
That said, I'm not a huge cyberpunk fan. I much prefer modern hard sci-fi and space opera with transhumanist themes. Coming to the novel without any knowledge of the plot save the cyberpunk genre, I was pleasantly surprised to find both strong AI and human mind digitization/uploading as a means of survival beyond biological death (Neuromancer comes from both "neuro" and "necromancer"). Gibson's treatment of AI is liberal for its time: He does not condemn the computers despite their inhuman natures. It makes for an interesting comparison with Dick's treatment of the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Despite their human traits, those androids' inhumanity is ample justification for their destruction.
I could ramble on for quite some time about this book. It has compelling imagery and a dark story. It also touches on themes and plot elements popular in current sci-fi. Go read it already!
Thumbs: Up