Thoughts on this Veeky Forums? should i give it a shot? i'm generally into sci-fi and i've heard good stuff about it

cool thanks for the resources! i wasn't aware that it would be a difficult read. honestly that's turning me off a bit. i'm not sure if i have the discipline to sit down and try to make sense of something that's really confusing and convoluted. maybe i'll still give it a shot though.

> space rastafarians

dropped

Why? What's not to like?

Worked for the matrix, which blatantly ripped of Gibson at many turns.

Didn't age as well as it could, but still a good read and I'd say worthy of the hype. I'd recommend it.

Wouldn't say it's his best work, mind you, I'd have to give that to All Tomorrow's Parties. But you kind of have to go through Virtual Light and Idoru first to really appreciate ATP.

...so, anyone else thing Gibson's work has really dropped in quality lately? Zero History was among the worst books I've ever read, what with the quest for the magic pants and all, terrible follow-up to Spook Country. And while The Peripheral had an intriguing plot, I think it displayed Gibson's worst characterization to date. Flynne was written inconsistently and I'm not sure why Wift was even a PoV character; his only actions that really drove the plot took place before the book began. Seriously, he had less agency than any character Gibson had ever written, characters who spent their screentime having been kidnapped, and one or two children who spent their screentime having been kidnapped. Why were his experiences even part of the narrative considering he did fuck-all but watch other people move the plot?

>without all the weaboo technobabble
That's kinda the whole appeal though. Take away that and you just have a heist story.

Chill, dude. It's pulp fiction, not the Critique of Pure Reason.

Re-read it over Christmas, sad to say it was far worse than I remembered it at the time. The plot is nothing short of atrocious.

What I will say though is that in establishing its place, you need to work quite to remember when it was written. One of the most interesting and prescient things about it is not the internet (which barely features) but the role and nature of corporations.

Admittedly they are the wrong corporations with the wrong structures (America was going through a bit of a panic about Japan at the time). Cyberspace isn't interesting in Neuromancer for its own sake, its because its a post-national corporate space. Although in retrospect Gibson had no idea just how post-national globalisation was going to get. You don't have to send yourself into space, you sit exactly where you are and demand your national government ignores the fact, which is what they basically do now.

everyone keeps saying burroughs and you're thinking of a pulp adventure writer, and i'm remembering the scene where Peter Riviera faked unconsciousness and then made a holographic monster appear to push up through his chest. that was kind of William S Burroughs.

"What kinda creepjoint you running here, Sy? I been gang-fucked."

I've never read it but Sonic Youth wrote a song about it so it must be good

if you think "Neuromancer" didn't age well, i invite you to read Edward Elmer Smith's "Skylark" books.

one of the characters actually said "That's mighty white of you!" and i had to look it up.

which song?

I'd say Neuromancer straddles between genre fiction and literary fiction

The Sprawl off Daydream Nation

Read any heist book because at its core that's basically what it is.

>this thread again

Look, even Gibson himself thinks it's an "adolescent" work at best. He blagged it out along with the other Sprawl books.

You should read it if you're interested in the roots of cyberpunk and don't mind sometimes convoluted prose. Otherwise, check out the Bridge trilogy or maybe Pattern Recognition, because his writing has been floating that style for some time.

oh shit that's one of my favorite albums ever and i had no idea. thanks for the info

saying this as someone who loves gibson and hasn't read anything past Idoru, has he learned how to write endings yet?

...sort of?

I think "closure" is a bit much. Let's just go with "ending" and leave it at that.

>gibson

skip it

>the internet
>which barely features
what book did you read

Neuromancer is only good if you read it as a sequel to Gravity's Rainbow.

>Don’t they teach you history these days? Great bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that... great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology.

I remembered it differently too but go and read it again, very, very little happens in cyberspace in Neuromancer (not the Sprawl trilogy but Neuromancer itself).

I wouldn't really count the Sense/Net stuff with Wintermute because the idea of talking to people who are actually other people in dreams or the subconscious or something isn't a new idea. Star Trek used it all the time.

Case's l33t haxoring amounts to pressing a button once and waiting for the Chinese hacking software to change the colour of a cube over a period of hours with commentary from Dixie Flatline.

Its all about corporations in the end, not cyberspace. The AIs are a riff on corporate personhood, thats why Wintermute is legally a person in Switzerland (vaguely satirical).

The other thing to say about this now I think about it is that as someone says above, its a heist story. Heist stories always have at least dual narratives, its the coordination between events that makes them exciting (the film Inception carries this to its logical conclusion).

In Neuromancer, cyberspace provides the backdrop for the secondary narrative. Novelty aside though, its just not very exciting.

Not difficult if you're not expecting something to do with punk. It's just a noir heist set in a late 70s hard scifi near future.