Neuromancer by William Gibson
“You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly said.
These notes were created during my reading process to aid in my own understanding and were not written for the purpose of instruction or summarization. With that said, I get super excited to discuss ideas contained within, but rarely (read never) do I encounter anyone reading the same stuff. I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they attract a shared excitement to discuss or are perhaps helpful to other readers. Feel free to ask questions and interact. Enjoy!
Opinion
Neuromancer is the sci-fi book I’ve been searching for. It was so good I really didn’t want to critique it while reading. I wanted to bask in the neon glow of the Sprawl in lock-step with Case and Molly. After finishing this book, I had to do a little digging to see what others had thought and find out more about the author, William Gibson.
Turns out Gibson was not a scientist, technologist, or futurist. However, what he had in spades was capital C coolness.
The most exciting aspect of the whole book is that it is unendingly cool. It isn’t hard sci-fi that maps perfectly to the bounds of reality. It’s whimsical and unconstrained by anything except “how cool would it be if.” For example, Molly, the famed bodyguard assassin, is described as having surgically implanted neurological enhancements that make her into a seemingly unbeatable killing machine.
Gibson’s staccato prose flit across the page as if he were under the influence of the amphetamines (he very well may have been) his cast of characters readily consume as they navigate the Sprawl. Gibson’s Neuromancer is essentially upstream of all the contemporary sci-fi narratives, including Star Trek and Star Wars. Reading this felt like an origin story for a cultural phenomenon I had taken for granted.
Gibson created a genre, language, and culture. Jack Womack mentions in the afterward that:
For if Gibson in truth had nothing to do with the making of cyberpunk as it came to be known (he didn't create it, didn't name it, and after it was cursed with its catchy monicker, didn't want a whole lot to do with it), in the most genuine sense he did create cyberspace. Not merely the word (see the OED); the place.
Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” and is the progenitor of the cyberpunk aesthetic. He referred to the “matrix” 40 years before Neo graced the big screen. Here’s Womack again:
When Neuromancer appeared it was picked up and devoured by hundreds, then thousands, of men and women who worked in or around the garages and cubicles where what is still called new media were, fitfully, being birthed; thousands who, on reading his sentence as quoted above, thought to themselves, That's so fucking cool, and set about searching for any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into silicon reality…
Once a creation goes out in the world its creator, like any parent, loses the control once so easily exertable over the offspring; another variety of emergent behavior, you could say. That's so fucking cool, man-I think we can pull it off. So rather than the theoretical Matrix, we now, thanks to all those beautiful William Gibson readers out there in the dark, have the actual Web-same difference, for all intents and purposes, or it will be soon enough.
It’s not hard to imagine young capital “N” nerds like Jobs or Gates or Lucas reading this and saying to themselves, “I think we can pull this off.”
What I’m stealing
Reading this was a reminder to make, create, and seek out things just for the sake of them being cool. Coolness has been devalued in our contemporary culture, and I, for one, am ready to see it return.
Supplemental
Best futurists ever: How William Gibson’s Neuromancer shaped our vision of technology
Dog ears, highlights, marginalia
Part 1
Chapter 1
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel (Page 3)
In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. (Page 3)
her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight. (Page 9)
It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know how you're wired." (Page 33)
Chapter 2
He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral. (Page 42)
Part 2
Chapter 3
He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art. (Page 48)
burgundy nails. (Page 49)
Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question (Page 49)
Chapter 5
With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was formidable, (Page 80)
their high heels like polished hooves (Page 83)
Chapter 7
the car's gray ultrasuede. (Page 94)
Part 3
Chapter 8
Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?" (Page 115)
Chapter 9
cracked leather holster fastened beneath the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel and triggerguard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt (Page 127)
Chapter 10
Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple Shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry (Page 137)
Part 4
Chapter 16
TA's main problems is that every family bigwig has riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and exceptions. Kinda like your immune system falling apart on you. Ripe for virus. (Page 207)
Chapter 17
he'd never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.
Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsys, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. (Page 217)
"How's it go, Dixie?"
"Fine. Too slick. Thing's amazing... Shoulda had one that time in Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they were worth. But that's ancient history. This baby takes all the drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder what a real war would be like, now.
"If this kinda shit was on the street, we'd be out a job' Case said. (Page 218)
Chapter 18
studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist.
It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it. (Page 227)
Chapter 22
"Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia nigra (Page 269)
Afterward
He gave me a copy of Cormac MeCarthy's Blood Meridian. (Page 297)
Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music (Page 302)
For if Gibson in truth had nothing to do with the making of cyberpunk as it came to be known (he didn't create it, didn't name it, and after it was cursed with its catchy monicker, didn't want a whole lot to do with it), in the most genuine sense he did create cyberspace. Not merely the word (see the OED); the place.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation. (Page 294)
When Neuromancer appeared it was picked up and devoured by hundreds, then thousands, of men and women who worked in or around the garages and cubicles where what is still called new media were, fitfully, being birthed; thousands who, on reading his sentence as quoted above, thought to themselves, That's so fucking cool, and set about searching for any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into silicon reality. Now Gibson's imagined future cannot by any means be called optimistic (nor, in truth, can it be called pessimistic-it is beyond both); more to the point, he has often said that he intended "cyberspace" to be nothing more than a metaphor. No matter. Once a creation goes out in the world its creator, like any parent, loses the control once so easily exertable over the offspring; another variety of emergent behavior, you could say. That's so fucking cool, man-I think we can pull it off. So rather than the theoretical Matrix, we now, thanks to all those beautiful William Gibson readers out there in the dark, have the actual Web— same difference, for all intents and purposes or it will be soo n enough (Page 296)
Interesting to note that Gibson scrapped writing a book when Trump got elected, “I woke up the day after that and I looked at the manuscript and the world in which the novel was set – a contemporary novel set in San Francisco – and I realised that that world no longer existed. That the characters’ emotional basis made no sense; that no one’s behaviour made any sense. Something of this tremendous enormity had just happened and I felt really lost – and sort of mournful. I was losing this book.”