Review - Neuromancer by William Gibson

Disclaimer: I was thoroughly drunk for most of this novel, so the following review is likely to be at best useless and at worst deeply insulting to William Gibson.

So, what can we say about Gibson’s seminal and oddly prescient cyberpunk work from all the way back when I was still incapable of feeding myself? Well, when I first picked it up (I say “picked it up” but really I mean I went to Amazon and checked the page count) I thought I’d get through it in about a day. Fool!

Neuromancer, first and foremost, is an epic masquerading as a novella. Gibson’s writing is something like concentrated fruit syrup. His clipped and abrupt style, heavy use of sentence fragments, and employment of a totally nihilistic protagonist, leave the reader to infer much of the information that other authors might be compelled to painstakingly spell out for fear of losing their audience. Indeed, Gibson has said in interviews that he compulsively rewrote the beginning of the book because of just such a fear.

But the high-potency prose, fragmented imagery and the weird cyber-noir mystery of the novel only add to the charm of the story. Like so much cyberpunk and hard science fiction – or anything written in the first-person – there is a distinct lack of dramatic irony; the protagonist always knows more about their world than the reader. In Neuromancer, all these elements culminate in an interestingly dream-like reading experience. But just as you feel you might be getting lost in the odd parlance, or the strange architecture of Gibson’s cyberspace (a term which he coined, in fact), the author drops back in with just enough information to ease the beginnings of the frown from your brow.

I like the challenge of being left to my own imaginative devices in the forest of a book. The vast sections of the novel in which the reader is essentially “abandoned” by Gibson provide an awesome opportunity for right-brain exercise. The man is no Nazi when it comes to delineating the edges within which the reader’s mind ought to operate. He’s more of a literary shepherd than a story-teller, I think. He just dumps a bunch of images on you and lets you run with them for a while before stepping back in to make sure things are on the right track. Passing thought: this probably makes it easier to get something new out of the book on any subsequent readings.

But let’s get to the story because I could ramble on like this forever...

Meet Case, a washed-out freelance hacker no longer capable of interfacing with cyberspace after having his neurons selectively fried by a disgruntled ex-employer. He now lives in a place called Night City, a dingy, hopeless belt of red light businesses situated somewhere between Tokyo’s CBD and its seaport. With his professional faculties crippled, Case has resorted to dealing in contraband and ingesting vast quantities of narcotics at every opportunity -- two habits which are slowly but surely destroying him. But just when his nihilistic existence has pushed his body and mind to their very limits, he meets Molly and Armitage, who promise to restore his nerves if he’ll help them pull off the ultimate cyber-heist. But not everything is as it seems (especially when you’re reading the book drunk).

I ought to wrap this up here, because I'm in no position to recall the book in any great detail or illuminate it with any profound insights. My message here is simple, really: If cyberpunk is your thing, or dystopian thrillers, or high-tech hacker drama, or even generic speculative fiction, then you should already have Neuromancer on your bookshelf. If you liked Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (then get off my fucking blog) and haven't read this, do so immediately. If you liked Jeff Noon's Vurt and haven't read this, as above. Etc. etc. and so forth.

And now that we have all seen just to what shoddy depths my reviews can fall, let's look ahead to the next book, for which I am determined not to be inebriated.