#william gibson

[litexcerpts]

His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

[mani-e]

Man I fucking love Neuromancer, and I love Burning Chrome. I love how Gibson describes literally everything. Sure, Gibson, I have no fucking clue what you mean but hell yeah, Gibson. "The Magnetic Dog sisters" yeah Gibson, sure, why not. They're both two metres tall? One black and one white, like literally? Sure Gibson, fucking whatever you say Gibson I'm just here for the ride. The fucking Magnetic Dog Sisters... god, what a phrase

[litexcerpts]

Case knew that at some point he’d started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

[thesobsister]

Cover of Neuromancer, Ace edition, July 1984

It’s easy to imagine this book’s emergence a decade later, around the time Hackers was released and, thus, associate it with the music, especially electronic, of that era.

But no. Neuromancer emerged at the end of the first Reagan term. Tech had just reached the Macintosh 128K level. The GUI and mouse were newborn. One of the things that makes this book remarkable, and Gibson’s vision extraordinary, is the extrapolation from C:\ prompts, green-on-black monitors, and DOS commands to the virtual world of cyberspace that it details.

One expects The Future Sound of London and Aphex Twin, Underworld and Autechre, to soundtrack the book. But it was written at a time when Manuel Göttsching, Jean-Maurice Jarre, and The Art of Noise were big names in electronic music, alongside the New Romantic—>synthpop bands, while Blade Runner was the, perhaps “lone,” film to provide an early visual template for the imagined cyberpunk milieu.

Truly visionary.

[thesobsister]

Teaser trailer for Neuromancer

There are certain works that open your eyes to the previously unimagined possibilities of a genre, an art form, a medium. United States I-IV. Bitches Brew. Autobiography of Red. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (LP and book, both). For me, Neuromancer was one of them.

This adaptation is Apple, not Netflix, and the House of Jobs has done right so far by a number of prestige sci-fi properties (Foundation, Murderbot, Silo), so, fingers crossed.

[edenssh]

[bjugnakraekir]

i thought my reading comprehension got better after reading a bunch of jules verne but after trying to read neuromancer it does not seem so

[bobcalzone]

It took bumping a reread to the top of my queue, but I successfully broke the downstreak!

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Novel grade: A- (4⅓/5)

I felt the same way about this novel as I did on first read three years ago — it's one helluva time, and still my favorite sci-fi that predates Ender's Game. Gibson knows exactly how to keep both feet on the gas while maintaining just enough grip on the wheel to prevent the ride from fishtailing out of control, and even his descriptions of the setting are breezy while still being sufficiently informative and, to be honest, really fucking cool. Maybe the novel isn't safe from how the prediction of a futuristic society (and the interconnection of data via an Internet analogue) hasn't aged all that well, and sure, outside of a few scenes (which are excellent) the characters tend to be style over substance...but with a setting this cool and a narrative this engaging, who really needs character depth?

Next up: Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus!