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Neuromancer
by William Gibson
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Let’s face it, science fiction books are not famous for their
memorable opening lines. You might hear the person next to
you on the subway remark: "It was the best of times; it was the
worst of times." But how often do you run into someone
muttering: "In the week before their departure to Arrakis, an
old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul"? And yes
we know, by now, that "Happy families are all alike, but every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But how many of
us have memorized: "His name was Gaal Dornick and he was
just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before"?
Ah, William Gibson broke the rule with his 1984 classic
Neuromancer. The particular ambiance of the book was
captured in its oft-quoted opening line: "The sky above the
port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Of
course, this was an old-school tube television, where the dead
channels were much more poetic
than the prosaic blankness of my
current big-screen, satellite
contraption. No, the technology
was not always futuristic in this
book. Everybody has the raddest
gear in Neuromancer, yet they
still need to use pay phones
because the cell phone is not
part of the envisioned environment. Still, fans of this book—
there are many, and I include myself in their ranks—will
overlook such tiny oversights: by any reasonable standard of
forecasting, Gibson’s novel stands out as one of the most
prescient of its era.
When Neuromancer was published, only around 1% of
Americans owned a computer, and the World Wide Web was
just a glimmer in Al Gore’s eyes. Yet Gibson not only conceived
of a plausible evolution of virtual reality, but had already
envisioned the kind of hacker culture that
would emerge as the dark side of the web.
To grasp the future of the technology
would have been a stunning achievement
in its own right, but Gibson also had a hold
on the attitudes and slang, the very anthro-
pology of cyberspace. The formula was so
distinctive and persuasive that Neuro-
mancer was seen by many as more than a
fine book. It heralded a new movement, a
variant of sci-fi that came to be known as
cyberpunk.
The key here was not Gibson’s dark vision
of the future—many earlier sci-fi writers had used genre
conventions to paint a bleak future. But for Orwell and
Atwood, Huxley and Bradbury, the ugliness invariably came
from the government and ruling social institutions, while the
“common people” were viewed as victims, almost Rousseauian
in their innocence. Gibson, in contrast, is more the Thomas
Hobbes of sci-fi. The nastiness is not just institutionalized, but
pervasive, in his world view, and separating the heroes from
the villains is murky business at best.
The protagonist of Neuromancer, Henry Dorsett Case, makes
this moral ambiguity clear from the start. A hustler, drug
addict and master hacker, Case was caught stealing from a
previous employer, who punished him with a toxin that
seriously damaged his central nervous system and restricted
his predatory computer activities. He is promised a cure by a
mysterious figure named Armitage, who wants Case’s help in a
dangerous hacking scheme. Yes, it’s hard to figure out who is
the bad guy, when all the key players are manipulating and
extorting each other.
Along the way, Case enlists the assistance of Molly, who has
undergone more reconstructive surgery than Joan Rivers, but
all in the interest of adding an arsenal of bionic weapons and
cool spy tools to her flesh and blood. Another helper, McCoy
Pauley—known as the Dixie Flatline—has no flesh and blood.
He is a former hacker genius, a "console cowboy" in Gibson’s
evocative terminology, now relegated to read-only memory.
The Flatline, living up to his name, could easily be a flat
character—after all, how much charisma can a download of a
dead man possess? But Gibson realizes that the type of techno-
anomie he is trying to convey requires characters with a large
dose of sleazy panache, and he delivers the goods again and
again in Neuromancer.
Today this book is acknowledged as a classic, and rightly so.
Who can’t recognize the modern-day Internet world in
passages such as the following: "Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being taught
mathematical concepts....A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system. Unthinkable complexity." But the literary world, circa
1984, was not ready to accept this book as a serious work of
fiction.
Two decades later, Time magazine would pick Neuromancer as
one of the 100 best English-language novels published since
1923. Yet Time, and almost everyone else, was late to the
game. A decade would elapse after its publication before the
New York Times would even bother to notice that
Neuromancer existed—although it had won the Hugo, the
Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award on its first appearance, sort of
a sci-fi equivalent of the Triple Crown. The judges on the
awards panels got this one right, even if the highbrows missed
out for many years.
This book is now on its second and third generation of readers,
and its reputation is secure. Yet I fear that too much of the buzz
surrounding this novel still treats it as a sociological
phenomenon. Gibson is given credit for making a prediction
that proved to be uncannily accurate. His book is thus put on
the shelf next to “Moore’s Law” and other formidable
hypotheses that anticipated our current-day high tech lives.
But this pigeonholing misses the main reasons to read
Neuromancer today, now that cyberspace is as blasé as a
transistor radio, at least from a conceptual standpoint.
Neuromancer still earns its readership through the sweep of its
prose, the intensity of its vision, and the provocative nature of
its characters and plots. And those virtues run no risk of
technological obsolescence.
by William Gibson
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Let’s face it, science fiction books are not famous for their
memorable opening lines. You might hear the person next to
you on the subway remark: "It was the best of times; it was the
worst of times." But how often do you run into someone
muttering: "In the week before their departure to Arrakis, an
old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul"? And yes
we know, by now, that "Happy families are all alike, but every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But how many of
us have memorized: "His name was Gaal Dornick and he was
just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before"?
Ah, William Gibson broke the rule with his 1984 classic
Neuromancer. The particular ambiance of the book was
captured in its oft-quoted opening line: "The sky above the
port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Of
course, this was an old-school tube television, where the dead
channels were much more poetic
than the prosaic blankness of my
current big-screen, satellite
contraption. No, the technology
was not always futuristic in this
book. Everybody has the raddest
gear in Neuromancer, yet they
still need to use pay phones
because the cell phone is not
part of the envisioned environment. Still, fans of this book—
there are many, and I include myself in their ranks—will
overlook such tiny oversights: by any reasonable standard of
forecasting, Gibson’s novel stands out as one of the most
prescient of its era.
When Neuromancer was published, only around 1% of
Americans owned a computer, and the World Wide Web was
just a glimmer in Al Gore’s eyes. Yet Gibson not only conceived
of a plausible evolution of virtual reality, but had already
envisioned the kind of hacker culture that
would emerge as the dark side of the web.
To grasp the future of the technology
would have been a stunning achievement
in its own right, but Gibson also had a hold
on the attitudes and slang, the very anthro-
pology of cyberspace. The formula was so
distinctive and persuasive that Neuro-
mancer was seen by many as more than a
fine book. It heralded a new movement, a
variant of sci-fi that came to be known as
cyberpunk.
The key here was not Gibson’s dark vision
of the future—many earlier sci-fi writers had used genre
conventions to paint a bleak future. But for Orwell and
Atwood, Huxley and Bradbury, the ugliness invariably came
from the government and ruling social institutions, while the
“common people” were viewed as victims, almost Rousseauian
in their innocence. Gibson, in contrast, is more the Thomas
Hobbes of sci-fi. The nastiness is not just institutionalized, but
pervasive, in his world view, and separating the heroes from
the villains is murky business at best.
The protagonist of Neuromancer, Henry Dorsett Case, makes
this moral ambiguity clear from the start. A hustler, drug
addict and master hacker, Case was caught stealing from a
previous employer, who punished him with a toxin that
seriously damaged his central nervous system and restricted
his predatory computer activities. He is promised a cure by a
mysterious figure named Armitage, who wants Case’s help in a
dangerous hacking scheme. Yes, it’s hard to figure out who is
the bad guy, when all the key players are manipulating and
extorting each other.
Along the way, Case enlists the assistance of Molly, who has
undergone more reconstructive surgery than Joan Rivers, but
all in the interest of adding an arsenal of bionic weapons and
cool spy tools to her flesh and blood. Another helper, McCoy
Pauley—known as the Dixie Flatline—has no flesh and blood.
He is a former hacker genius, a "console cowboy" in Gibson’s
evocative terminology, now relegated to read-only memory.
The Flatline, living up to his name, could easily be a flat
character—after all, how much charisma can a download of a
dead man possess? But Gibson realizes that the type of techno-
anomie he is trying to convey requires characters with a large
dose of sleazy panache, and he delivers the goods again and
again in Neuromancer.
Today this book is acknowledged as a classic, and rightly so.
Who can’t recognize the modern-day Internet world in
passages such as the following: "Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being taught
mathematical concepts....A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system. Unthinkable complexity." But the literary world, circa
1984, was not ready to accept this book as a serious work of
fiction.
Two decades later, Time magazine would pick Neuromancer as
one of the 100 best English-language novels published since
1923. Yet Time, and almost everyone else, was late to the
game. A decade would elapse after its publication before the
New York Times would even bother to notice that
Neuromancer existed—although it had won the Hugo, the
Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award on its first appearance, sort of
a sci-fi equivalent of the Triple Crown. The judges on the
awards panels got this one right, even if the highbrows missed
out for many years.
This book is now on its second and third generation of readers,
and its reputation is secure. Yet I fear that too much of the buzz
surrounding this novel still treats it as a sociological
phenomenon. Gibson is given credit for making a prediction
that proved to be uncannily accurate. His book is thus put on
the shelf next to “Moore’s Law” and other formidable
hypotheses that anticipated our current-day high tech lives.
But this pigeonholing misses the main reasons to read
Neuromancer today, now that cyberspace is as blasé as a
transistor radio, at least from a conceptual standpoint.
Neuromancer still earns its readership through the sweep of its
prose, the intensity of its vision, and the provocative nature of
its characters and plots. And those virtues run no risk of
technological obsolescence.
| conceptual fiction |
