SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Finished - spoil away!

(If you didn't make it to the end, or found the book confusing, you might want to check out the I Didn't Get It thread as an alternative discussion point...

I finished it and I really enjoyed it. I did have some trouble getting immersed so I have a feeling that I'm going to forget what happened quickly.

I was puzzled because it dropped you into the middle of it but didn't give you much description as to what was going on. I also really didn't understand why he had to physically move from location to location rather than just staying someplace he could jack in.

I liked the noir feel of the story. Molly's character was actually pretty cool, too. I liked all of the modifications that they had done, especially Molly's finger blades, and Case's liver and pancreas mods made me laugh. And the fact that he had it reversed :) I did have trouble understanding Molly's eyes. It sounded like they looked like glasses but were fused to her head but I couldn't picture it.

Did anyone think the toxin sacs were a bit ridiculous? I thought he was going to find out they weren't really there.

Okay, let's see...

Wikipedia definitely helped me. I thought it was the Flatline who was in Case's body on the beach there at the end, but Wiki says Neuromancer copied Case's persona so he and Linda could live there with Neuromancer forever. That does seem more poetic (and bizarre). The Flatline evidently just got absorbed into Wintermute somehow, hence the laugh that was not a laugh near the end. (Though technically Wintermute and Neuromancer are one and the same at the end, I guess.)

Sarah, I see what you mean about moving around physically, but they only really needed his hacking twice, once to steal the Flatline ROM, and once to breach Starlight Vista, or whatever. The moving around seemed to be for the other people who needed physical parts, although you're right Armitage could have just been plugged him in somewhere and doped him up for the duration, except I guess they knew they might need him as a backup, and it's easier to keep an eye on him if he is with the rest of the team. Plus, all the physical locations were interesting to show the state of the world and get his commentary on things.

I thought Molly's eyes were reflective, so they looked like oval mirrors on her face, maybe even insect-like. Seems like Case saw himself sometimes when he was looking at her. It sounded creepy to me, and great for an assassin!

The toxin sacs seemed risky to me because really, they couldn't predict when they would go and you wouldn't want to lose your asset in the middle of a run. I believed it, though, with all the other implied biology mods, that seemed like a clever trick. (And pretty heartless, to just destroy him again!)

I liked the book overall, and am pretty amazed at how before its time it was, but I didn't really have a strong emotional investment. Part of it was it seemed a bit depressing, especially trying to connect to a main character who just wanted to die basically, was a stretch. And Molly was interesting, but their relationship seemed opaque - he seemed to have a lot of emotional investment in it but why? He (and we) have really almost no knowledge about Molly. Her disappearing at the end was the part of her personality that seemed to ring the most true. There was no way to decipher her motives for the rest of it (other than her wanting to kill Riviera, and make an attempt at the ninja).

Buddy Read for April 20th, 2019

Let's do it! This book is on the Group Shelf and can be used in several of the challenges. It's one of those books that I labeled "should read at some point" and never got around to it.

I'm not sure if I'll be a fan but we can cheer & boo together. We'll start the Buddy Read on April 20th, 2019.

Be kind & use spoiler tags. I'm sure we'll have people reading at different paces & it's always cool to jump into the conversation when you get to the cool or blooper parts. =)

I'm in.

Me, too … and I'm already dreading it. I guess I will use it for the TBR-challenge for the intimidating book. My partner owns it and when I told him, I would borrow it for a BR, he had a pitying smile on his face and wished me good luck. XD

Lol that does not sound very encouraging. This would be a second try for me as I DNFed it the first time.

I'm probably in...this has been on my to read list for a while.

Silvana, I'm curious what made you DNF it and why you're ready to give it another try.

Ryan, it was my first cyberpunk read and I remember being confused and was barely able to follow the story. Now that I have increased my mileage, I think a second try would be good especially since I have buddies to read it.

I started it today. Reading it for the second time after many years.

I read this several years ago. I'm interested to see people's thoughts.

Damn! I just realised that the BR starts the day I'm off to off-line land. I only have app access via smartphone for a week. I can read the group discussions there, but for whatever reason I can't comment myself. So unless I figure out the problem with the app I will be late to the party ... :(

Gabi wrote: "Damn! I just realised that the BR starts the day I'm off to off-line land. I only have app access via smartphone for a week. I can read the group discussions there, but for whatever reason I can't ..."

Can you use the mobile web version? https://www.goodreads.com/toggle_mobile

That's the version I use. On rare occasions I get a "comment" button, but more often than not it's not there. I will have to try. I will read and follow the discussion. In spirit I'm there.

I just saw the thanks to Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner and John Sterling ... I read several short stories by these authors in the first 5 volumes of Dozois' year's best. They were more miss than hit for me - so I'm prepared ;)

I remembered the prose being dense with acronyms and neologisms. Now, for the first few chapters, things didn't seem bad at all. Then the jargon started getting piled on, one term after another.

I’m a couple of hours into the audiobook and really find it hard to focus on. I mean Gibson clearly writes in English but it’s so muddled I have no clear idea of what’s going on. A strange experience.

I read this in the latter half of the '80s somewhere but not since, and am curious how well it'll hold up (if at all). I won't be able to join in 'til next week, but will follow folks' comments in the meantime!

21% in.

I am rather enjoying it ; it feels atmospheric with all the place descriptions and whatnots. Laughed (again) when reading about Ting Ting Djahe (an Indonesian delicacy), one of the many Asian influences in the book's future setting. I read it in Kindle so it's easier to find the meanings of the many Japanese words. Not a fan yet of the MC, though Molly is kinda cool and so does the world. The Matrix is influenced by this so I am curious to see more of the original version.

Let's see if I could get pass the 30% mark this time.

Just finished it and well it’s just not my kind of story. I had to pull up a plot summary to actually follow what was going on. I get that half the story happened in cyberspace but why and how and which parts went a little over my head. I’m just not good at stories that are too metaphysical. I’m also one of those who came out of the cinema having watched The Matrix having had no greater life changing I-question-everything experience. I was mostly impressed with the soundtrack XD

I'm starting now while I wait for the Easter bunny be baked (and I got access to the comments function with my app! Yeah!)

Ah! First page, Kirin. Brings back memories. I was working with Kirin back in my days in medical device production.

I am finished. Finally, after four years :D

I liked it enough to be a three-star book. The plot kinda lost me in the last one third of the book due to many new characters and vague motivations but overall the immersive worldbuilding and some the not-so-outdated ideas were enjoyable to read.

Whew! That's hard work. I'm no fan of the writing style and the scrapped characters. So it's a bit difficult to keep my interest up ...

It was interesting to see some words and concepts that would go on to influence science fiction and pop culture. But the characters and plot didn't satisfy me. The prose was strangely schizophrenic. Sometimes it was jargon. Other times, Gibson seemed to be trying to score points with the literary crowd.

Overall, I give it 2.5 stars.

Agree with both of you about the characters and writing. 2.5 stars was what I felt it was as well. Glad I’m not alone 😅

Unfinished at 31%, page 81. The world here had potential, but the world-building was nearly nonexistent, and thus it was frequently confusing. Furthermore, the characters were uninteresting, the hacking action was very hard to follow, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about the stakes. Finally, the prose was choppy; there were far too many incomplete sentences.

Now I’m considering lowering my rating to 2 stars, lol.

Ryan, you were me four years ago 😅

:D … I'm so struggling with it as well. If it weren't a group shelf book, I would DNF it.

I finished it, yeah! I finished it! The third star really is only there cause I appreciate the novel's importance as a milestone in cyberpunk. Perhaps I would have thought otherwise If I had read it back in the 80ies then, when my partner bought it. But nowadays it is more or less unbearable for me in regards of character, plot and prose.
Been there, done that. Now on to something more likeable.

Well done, Gabi XD Yeah, to me it’s also an “okay now I’ve read it, moving on” kind of book.

I read this a few years back and had similar feelings as other folks, including about finding some parts confusing, especially the ending. I remember just not being able to visualize what Gibson was describing. I read it because I wanted to read this classic work, and overall I liked it fine. But, at that point I had already read Snow Crash, which has similar elements and which I found amazing, so Neuromancer really paled in comparison.

I'll try to revise the novel quickly and will put my notes here.

that opening sentence is legendary; but what amazes me is the number of levels on which it works.
The colour (which apparently has changed since) tells the reader that there is no hope in this world, thus setting the grim tone for an entire genre and aesthetic. It also implies that the situation is entirely man-made, and that the artificial has supplanted even the most basic aspects of the natural. Moreover, it uses a screen as a metaphor, which will be so crucial in the novel (and the entire genre).

Am I mistaken in seeing talking names here? Especially at the outset.
A hustler named Case, a low-level criminal lord called Wage, a pub nicknamed the Chat...

I'm so relieved other people seem to be of the same opinion. I spent the whole time reading it thinking, but this is a classic, so many people must love it, maybe I'm reading it wrong? But it looks like I'm not the only one who was confused.

The whole thing just felt a bit too much like it was trying too hard to be cool and edgy. (Sexy future-girlfriend with knife hands? Really?)

I was interested in the ways Riviera and Wintermute played with Case's sense of reality (particularly when he was doped up, which was a lot) and liked how smoothly Gibson slipped from reality to hallucination, but I feel like it could have been a lot more effective if I'd had half a clue what the reality was supposed to look like.

Reading the posts so far, it does look like not many readers in the previous incarnations of this thread really had a smooth experience with the novel.

Perhaps being familiar with the genre and, partly, with the novel helped. As I said in the VBC, I've been fascinated by cyberpunk for decades, and while reading Neuromancer five years ago I got to chapter 12 (one chapter ahead of the Straylight Run).
Then again, I guess I took the prose as a given. Gibson whipped up a hard-boiled emulsion, spiked it with slang from bikers and drug dealers, famously conjured much of the technological terminology, and then boiled it all down. The result is exhilarating but, well, not smooth (despite my metaphor).

And the slang isn't even the worst of it, from a certain perspective. For instance, the original Italian translation was notoriously bad (and I'm not sure there's been another one in the meantime), but I don't envy whoever was handed the hot potato. Because, while slang can be rendered in different ways with relative ease, nobody speaks in full sentences in the novel, and that's not something that necessarily translates well into a different language; yet it's part of what gives it such a spirited pace.

I also think we should distinguish between disappointment and confusion.

I thought the scifi ideas in Neuromancer were top-notch and did exactly what scifi is supposed to do: take a scientific idea and speculate on how the concept would evolve and change society decades or centuries later.

I just disliked the package the ideas came in so much that it was difficult to get through the book after the first 50 or so pages. The sentence structure was often either simplistic or incomprehensible, including the dialogue. I didn't connect with the characters, although I found Armitage/Corto and Riviera fascinating. I did appreciate that Gibson included a strong female character with agency and her own motivations in a book published in the mid-1980s. But, in general, I don't enjoy books in which characters are written to lack emotional depth and breadth, and their connections to other characters lack vulnerability.

So I would say, Neuromancer was just not for me. Perhaps if it had been about biotech, I would have enjoyed it much more.

I wanted to pick up this last point as well.

I'm not the expert here, but I'd venture saying that between black clinics, body augmentation, gene splicing, implants, prosthetics... there's more than enough to plant the seeds of biopunk.

On the other point: I keep thinking that some of the aspects y'all are complaining about were purposeful choices on Gibson's part: e.g. the lack of emotional depth was, I guess, part of the bleak outlook of this series.
I was considering some character or other the other day, and told myself "Oh, but he's nuts"... except none of them are sane, really, are they: damaged goods, the whole lot of them; which says a lot about this society.

I agree that, as we said in the VBC, character development could have been better. The Strong Female Character is on the brink of self-parody, though she also shows emotional frailty eventually. The portrayal of other ethnicities is on the verge of Orientalism and cliché: Delany was critical of the representation of Zion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroma...) and, for all the exoticism, we end up with a White Male Protagonist. That's probably the aspect that sounds most dated nowadays, actually.

Fun fact (pilfered from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpu... ):

The term cyberpunk was coined by Bruce Bethke, who "experimented with combining words for technology and troublemakers". He was also among those who later suggested that Gibson's imitators should rather be called Neuromantics, as a pun on both the title of this novel and the concurrent New Romantics wave.

A couple of articles from Reactor magazine (formerly tor.com):

https://reactormag.com/vivid-hopeless...
https://reactormag.com/a-transformati...

And a review... in comic panel format:
https://reactormag.com/does-neuromanc...

a.g.e. montagner wrote: "

https://reactormag.com/vivid-hopeless...
"

Vivid hopelessness is exactly the description I would use. I guess I'm not into that type of feel in a book.

I've only now read the article, which dwells on the opening sentence of the novel with much greater authority than I have. I feel validated though!

Cheryl, I think the novel has been so influential that we've basically come full circle: dystopias existed before, but Gibson's generation created a current that turned into a fashion that turned into a trope that everybody and their cousin has used, to the point that we're now tired of it and there's literally a wikipedia page on hopepunk.
But, yeah, he wasn't wrong. He took Reaganism and Thatcherism and catapulted it into the(ir, at the time) future. How much of it is off the mark?

(aside on Gibson and the history of dystopian sci-fi: he was born in 1948 and published his debut in 1984...)

a.g.e. montagner wrote: "I was considering some character or other the other day, and told myself "Oh, but he's nuts"... except none of them are sane, really, are they: damaged goods, the whole lot of them; which says a lot about this society."

That's a really interesting point actually. Even the AIs aren't exactly sane (whatever that means for a computer). I wonder how much of that was a deliberate choice on Gibson's part or whether it just continued the aesthetic of things he clearly found cool.

I was also thinking about how none of our main characters could really be considered the "good guys" - they're assassins and hackers and dodgy backstreet surgeons. Against the Straylight folks who live in light and wealth and beauty - all the things that history would tell us are signs of good. But then that's taken to obscene extremes so doesn't actually feel wholesome either. It's not the Grimdark thing of Everyone is Actually Horrible but it is hard to work out who is right. (I couldn't actually figure out how we're supposed to feel about 3Jane. Maybe Maelcum is ultimately a good guy, however awkwardly he's written?)

Alan Brown (in the second article I linked above) argues that "The Rastafarians are a refreshing change from the other characters, lively, spiritual, and happy", and I'm inclined to agree, broadly speaking.

I think the AIs are just meant to be non-human: self-serving, manipulating, ultimately uncaring.

Not that in the novel people are either empathetic or helpful, much of the time.

That can probably be ascribed to the neo noir setting.
In hard boiled fiction there's often a gray area that's neither good nor bad (curiously, not unlike sword and sorcery). In typical post-modern fashion, Gibson repurposes that element for a new century.