Book Review: Neuromancer
William Gibson’s groundbreaking cyberpunk classic.
I’ve been interested in reading Neuromancer for a while, so you can imagine I was thrilled when my wife’s cousin lent me her copy of the book. It’s sat on my shelf for a while though, because, y’know, TBRs be like that sometimes. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went in to reading it. I have encountered the cyberpunk aesthetic minimally - mainly through movies like Blade Runner, or games such as Cyberpunk 2077, (but also through Frasier Armitage’s fantastic novelette Rememory). The thing is, for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how that sheer vibe could come across in writing. Well, now I have my answer…
Blurb
The Matrix: a world within a world, a graphic representation of the databanks of every computer in the human system; a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate users in the Sprawl alone. And by Case, computer cowboy, until his nervous system is grievously maimed by a client he double-crossed. Japanese experts in nerve splicing and microbionics have left him broke and close to dead. But at last Case has found a cure. He's going back into the system. Not for the bliss of cyberspace but to steal again, this time from the big boys, the almighty megacorps. In return, should he survive, he will stay cured.
Review
I’ll start off by saying I didn’t love this book. There’s a lot of really cool stuff in it, but I found it difficult to read and it kind of spoiled the enjoyment for me. Right off the bat, the prose is dense and cryptic and weird, and there were a lot of metaphors that my dumb little lizard brain just couldn’t understand. I also found myself jumping back a lot to re-read whole sections because I realised that, though I had read the words, they didn’t make sense to me. I mean, you could take a random paragraph from this book without context and it will just look like a word salad. Even with context it’s just barely above that when you factor in a lot of unexplained slang and jargon. But I powered through and there is a lot to like about this book: the aesthetic, for one.
The worldbuilding of Neuromancer is perhaps its greatest strength. From the very first page, you can feel that the book is a whole vibe. Much as CD Projekt Red said that this book didn’t influence their game, it’s an almost perfect match for the tone and aesthetic - even matching a lot of the street slang (and also certain plot elements). Of course, there’s a lot of years of other works in the genre between this book and that game, but it was a surreal feeling nonetheless. The worldbuilding in Neuromancer is achieved in an interesting way that does a lot of work instilling the feeling of being immersed in a tech culture, for surprisingly little effort, and that is the inclusion of brands. Everything is branded. There’s well known tech brands from the 80s and 90s, (some of which are now defunct) and everything is referred to by its brand name. So instead of items being referred to in the generic sense, such as “such and such played on the screen”, you’ll have stuff happening on “the Hitachi” or “the Sony” etc… and Gibson goes a step further in branding the sci-fi tech in a similar fashion, whether that’s with real brand names or believable made-up ones: the Hosaka; the Ono-Sendai, and so on. The inclusion of the names of some of these older tech companies gives the impression of a retro-futuristic setting - especially where you might associate some of these brands with CRT monitors or cassette tape decks - but you’ve then got fully immersive virtual reality equipment that’s way more advanced than anything we’ve got even today, and it’s set in bulky plastic typical of the 80s and 90s with wires everywhere.
The sections of the book that take place in cyberspace can be a bit weird. They’re the ones I found hardest to follow, mainly because there’s not a lot of grounding there. Lots of shapes and colours, all painting a very surreal and abstract picture, but there wasn’t a lot for my imagination to really latch onto for visualisation.
On the flip-side, I was surprised just how much of this book takes place in space. I’ve always associated the cyberpunk genre with boots-on-the-ground, street-level, dirt and grime, slums, juxtaposed with high-technology, neon, chrome and back-alley body modifications. Anything to do with space is just background lore. In the movie Blade Runner, for instance: we hear from the replicant, Roy Batty, about Earth’s off-world ventures in his famous Tears in Rain monologue (attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; C-beams glittering in the dark by the Tannhauser Gate), but all of it only serves to give us the impression of a much larger world. In that sense, any high-tech epic space opera can incorporate that kind of cyberpunk experience if the stories were told at the street level with ordinary people. We see this a little bit in Star Wars with the planet Coruscant. But, back to Neuromancer, over half of the book is set on a space-station in microgravity, with space freighters, and space… Rastafarians? It certainly threw me off a bit. But it was also very interesting. As someone who is fascinated with space-based sci-fi in particular, this was probably the best portion of the book for me!
The plot is good, and held my interest throughout. It’s a lot that evolves at a blistering pace, and in some places I could’ve done with a bit more linkage between sections. In one section we might be in a location briefly, then there’s a line break and we’re somewhere totally different with no explanation as to how we got from A to B. It’s all a bit bleak as well. Everything is terrible in this society, from the top to the bottom. There’s very little in the way of anything light-hearted. The characters are extremely interesting and complex, but also very dour and self-serious. Case and Molly in particular. They always have a thing or two to say about Big Important Topics, even if sometimes that’s just taking a drag on a cigarette and saying “I don’t care, fuck everything”. I think, for me, it was a little bit much. It left me feeling numb by the end.
Overall, I’d recommend this for the experience of it, not necessarily the enjoyment. It wasn’t bad - on the contrary, a lot of it was good - but there were enough barriers to stop me really getting into it. I am glad I read it, but I won’t be continuing with the rest of the Sprawl series. It’s taken me a while to get this review written and posted, and in the time the story has sat with me and, I guess, matured. I feel like I’ve grown to appreciate it a bit more. Some books require a little longer to process, I think.
