"Neuromancer" by William Gibson

The novel that introduced the word 'cyberspace' and is credited with launching the cyberpunk genre.

It's science fiction and does a phenomenal job of world-building, creating a dystopian future in which the characters move between the Sprawl, a mega-city-sized red light district on Earth, and a multiple-zone orbiting space station. But the hero character, Case, also moves through cyberspace, using electrodes to log his consciousness into a variety of different computer systems (and other consciousnesses in an IT mediated form of telepathy), experiencing their information processing as sensory data and as thoughts, and holding conversations with other entities (who manifest themselves as people, some being people he knows or knew) travelling through this Matrix.

In many ways this is a thriller of the old order in which a washed-up lowlife, usually an ex-cop or a down-on-his-luck private eye but in this case a cowboy computer hacker, is recruited by a mysterious and potentially treacherous boss (in this case a rehabilitated soldier with a bad case of PTSD thast threatens to send him mad) to carry out a mission whose purpose he doesn't fully understand. On the way he picks upo companions: a female assassin whose mind he can enter and with whom he has sex (this too is described in information technology terms, considering DNA as a line of code: "Then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message."; Ch 20); a dead hacker whose consciousness exists on a ROM (a modern uptake on a spirit guide, or the voice of a ghost); a cliched Rastafarian; and an illusion-creating magician. At least one of these will betray the mission. This novel is Raymond Chandler updated for the internet generation.

The plot itself is a classic action plot, consisting mostly of a number of exciting fight sequences interspersed with moments of relaxation.  In essence, it's a heist. Predictably, the true reason why Case has been recruited doesn't emerge till later in the story.

Needless to say, there is no character development and the back stories did not make three-dimensional credible characters.

On the positive side, Gibson has a gift of original description:

• "Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." (Ch 1)
• "Her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight." (Ch 1)
• "Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach." (Ch 2)
• "She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill." (Ch 4)
• "The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone." (Ch 7)

In one way, this is an unusual book in that the hero doesn't risk life and limb, others do that for him. There were moments when I needed why Case was important to the team: his role seemed to be mostly that of observer. But I'm not sure. I found some of the writing so confusing that (a) I wasn't sure what was going on and (b) I didn't really care what was going on.  I was surprised, when I read the wikipedia plot summary afterwards, that I had actually known what was happening.

I think the reason why I found some of the writing difficult was that Gibson is a purist when it comes to world-building: he doesn't stop and explain what he is talking about, he describes things using terms that the characters would use and assumes the reader will come to understand in time (a bit like the slang language invented for A Clockwork Orange). For example: "Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input." (Ch 4) These two sentences contain six words that have particular meanings within the novel (cowboys, simstim, meat, trodes, cyberspace, matrix) and their arrival so early in the book means that one hasn't yet had time to understand them. This makes for slow reading. Nevertheless, one cannot deny to incredible power of the world Gibson has built, which spawned the cyberpunk genre.

Gibson's world reminded me of the world's built by William Burroughs in his works such as Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, and The Soft Machine.

Selected Quotes:

• "the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." (Ch 1)
• "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" (Ch 3)
• "The music that pulsed continually through the cluster ... was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalised pop." (Ch 8)
• "The multinationals that shaped the course of human history had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality." (Ch 17)

July 2022; 297 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God