Is this worth reading or is it too old to be of interest?

I read it and thought it was junk. I don't understand why it's at the top of science fiction lists. I've read Asimov, Herbert, Huxley, Clarke, and Heinlein, but it never made sense why Gibson should be up there. A lot of his descriptions of things are very long-winded and confusing, almost like he knew it wouldn't make sense to the reader so he tried explaining it more and failed.

I think he wanted it to just sound cool and for a lot of people it did (it kind of does). The problem is that there's a lot that doesn't sound cool at all (space rastas being one of them).

I'm pretty sure Pynchon wrote Bleeding Edge to correct Pattern Recognition.

i definitely found the Sprawl trilogy to be confusing as fuck, trying to describe way too many different angles through different characters.

but i still thought it was worth reading, the atmosphere he's describing still manages to shine through the mess.

i'm going to check out some of his later works just hoping that he really did learn to make more sense of what is actually happening

The aesthetic itself makes up for the flat characters and trite storyline. Gibson will always be one of my favourites.

Read Idoru, and his collection of short stories, Burning Chrome.

do you think the Bridge trilogy is noticeably cleaner and more understandable than the Sprawl trilogy?

like can you tell he's a better writer by then, or is he just a mess and that's just how it is?

>Idoru
>not Aidoru

It's a little dated but it's definitely still comprehensible and I'd say it's worth reading.

The creation of the cyberpunk genre really started with this book and it has a cool noir influence as well.

He definitely developed. His newer novels are not as all-over-the-place.

>Is this worth reading or is it too old to be of interest?
It's not worth reading, but not because of its age. The writing is just too bad for me to ever recommend someone reading it. Unfortunately, though, there aren't many decent cyberpunk books. For whatever reason visual media has far excelled books when it comes to cyberpunk.

Way too gritty for my tastes

this describes my feelings towards gibson exactly except i finished neuromancer (it starts strong and only gets worse) and gave gibson another shot with pattern recognition, which i found similarly disappointing

I think its mint. Worth the read, that original cover is tasty aswell.

Just read Johnny Mnemonic (the short story from which Neuromancer was born, and which shares some characters). If you like it and want more, go with Neuromancer, though expect it to be much slower and bulkier.

As for why it's usually at the top of cyberpunk lists is because, sure, Gravity's Rainbow might be considered one of the precursors to the genre, and sure, Bethke's "Cyberpunk" short story coined the term (the novel is shit though. Don't bother with it. Though then again, the short story is also shit. Reads like Doctorow, or hell, maybe Little Brother is outright plagiarism of the Cyberpunk short story), but Neuromancer was the first big success in the genre, and it laid the blueprint to cyberpunk world creation. Neuromancer is to cyberpunk what The Call of Cthulhu is to the Cthulhu mythos.

If it's the first cyberpunk book you ever read, it's kinda interesting but also pretty weird. There's a lot of stupid shit thrown in without any explanation or sense to it just to make it seem more complex and because
>hurr is da future bro

That being said, the Sprawl series isn't that bad, but it's not very good either. I've read all of it and afterwards I didn't feel like it was worth it. Interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, but perhaps that's because I'd come across all of the themes and ideas presented several times before, and at the time his books were published they were quite novel.

Depending on your tolerance for grittiness I'd say you're better off reading Altered Carbon for max grit or Snow Crash for light keks . Both have some interesting ideas and better writing. Both also suffer from that same randomness factor to a certain extent but at least they make an attempt to explain it, and in the case of Altered Carbon it actually makes sense.

i suggest transmetropolitan

you can download the whole archive as a torrent

>Too old to be of interest
Akira is even older.

>Cyberpunk
Very little to be found in Neuromancer. Read Gibson's collection Burning Chrome instead, if you're just looking for initiation into the CP underworld. If you like it, Count Zero is a lot more like it than NM and you don't lose anything skipping around Gibson's series, they almost always stand alone.

My nigga

i am only slightly dismayed to see a bunch of twelve-year-olds shitting on Gibson as if he wrote Neuromancer last year. for fuck's sake, try to read it in the context of the early eighties, when Larry fucking NIVEN was a mainstay of science fiction.

SF badly needed some protagonists who weren't white engineers.

totally worth reading - yeah, it's a bit cliche ridden now but only because people copied the shit of it in the 30 years since.
read this and read the collection of short stories, burning chrome - a couple of those are straight up masterpieces.

As you can see, OP, it's a foundation work. It is necessary to have fought your way through it once, so you know what you're talking about, but all assertions of difficult and florid style are correct. There is no good reason for the style to be so elliptical, other than the young writer's compulsion to be writerly.

Do it once then move on. You don't want to be a dilettante.

There is no science fiction past 1998.