I've been aware of Neuromancer for about as long as I've been aware of sci-fi (so, I'd say from about five years old on). I had always heard about how influential it was, how it created cyberpunk, and how it possibly helped shape the way the internet developed. For whatever reason, I didn't get around to reading it until college, and when I did, I found it needlessly dense and with a boring second half. Even understanding that the book came out in 1984, and had been so thoroughly pillaged by other authors, artists, and filmmakers in the decades since, I still found it to be uninteresting as prose.

But over the weekend I had three separate people bring the book up independent of each other, and it made me think that perhaps I hadn't comprehended it when I first read it. So I've been going back through it, and I'm still finding it impenetrable. I understand what's going on, but Gibson alternates between abrupt jumps in time and location and insanely detailed passages that I have trouble focusing on the story and the characters. I really want to like it, because I find the themes interesting, but Gibson's writing turns me off. Is this just a deficiency on my part or do other people find this book as frustrating as I do?

Hmm, Neuromancer is one of my favorites if only for the content (I'm big into cyberpunk), but I can understand what you mean by 'insanely detailed passages'. I wish I could find the quote but I remember reading once on how he spent this exhorbitant amount of time on just one sentence that he didn't end up even using, but he still remembers it word for word today. Cyberpunk can be a lot of style over substance - very prosey. Neuromancer was the first time I discovered how much you can say with a well defined sentence without a bunch of dreary exposition (e.g. she wore a pair of faded french orbital fatigues - what does that tell you about the setting?).

You might want to try the slightly abridged audiobook narrated by Gibson himself. Thats when I really got into the book - to hear the authors intonations as he intended to be read - plus he has this southern hipster drawl that seems to suit the book perfectly imho.

I might have to look into that. Re-reading it, some of the passages are thrilling, and others are dull as rocks. Perhaps he needed a more judicious editor.

I first attempted to read this back when I was the sixth or seventh grade, and quickly found I got lost somewhere in the story... I think it was when they introduced Riveria and he's doing all of that hologram shit. The whole thing was very overwhelming, with all of the high technology sprinkled casually throughout the urban squalor.

I made a second attempt at the book a few years later when I was in high school and it quickly became one of my favorite books. Thanks to its short length I've probably read it nine or ten times by now.

I tried to read it just a few years ago for the first time and it bored me to tears, and I've loved scifi since I was a wee lad. I'll have to try it again sometime soon. I'm currently slogging through The Fountainhead.

I read Neuromancer when it was fairly new, and it was amazing. Do you remember how when The Matrix came out, it didn't look like anything you'd seen before? Neuromancer was like that. So I have strong nostalgia affection for the book. But I was never able to read Mona Lisa Overdrive.

I can definitely see how the book would have been mind blowing when it first came out. I just wonder if it doesn't hold up as well as a story now that a lot of the novelty has worn off.

I read it a few years ago and actually loved the story and concepts. Yeah, it got wordy and convoluted at times, but I think it's the best of the genre.

I've been a big sci-fi reader for a while (reading since the late 70s). But I haven't been able to get into Gibson's writing. I read "Neuromancer" when I was in college, hearing all the raves and awards it received. I even tried to go back to Gibson and give the followups a chance. It's not that I find it over my head - I just don't enjoy Gibson's writing style.

Oh well Just because you don't enjoy something that's critically acclaimed doesn't mean you have a deficiency of some kind. Some things just aren't to everyone's tastes, and I certainly think William Gibson's writing is one of those.

This stuff was really visionary back in 1984.

Prior to that, science fiction always took place in its own world, with its own technology, and no sense of its own past. Everything was new and amazing and remarkable. The worlds created were often utopian in most ways.

The Sprawl world was like an extension of our own world. The mundane blended seamlessly with the remarkable, and there was always a connection to the past... one can imagine a working Commodore 64 and Apple ][ in the back of the Finn's workshop.

The society presented in the Sprawl was neither utopian nor dystopian, it was just people struggling to survive as they do now. Sure, the Soviets had won the cold war and the USA had broken down into city states, but it was still uncomfortably familiar.

If you can get past the anachronisms (like Case trying to fence three megabytes of RAM, Japan as a superpower), it is truly visionary, where you have high technology playing a part in everyone's lives, the security state, the reach of corporate power and the media, and the multiculturalism that results from the connectedness. Gibson certainly tapped into the zeitgeist in the late 70s and early 80s when he was coming up with all of this stuff.

How about the works of Philip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut? Or 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The War of the Worlds, or A Clockwork Orange, to name a few?

And there I'm just talking about books, if you want to go into movies, how about Blade Runner, which came out two years before Neuromancer?

As Sup says, methinks you weren't reading widely enough to obtain a perspective on this.

And I'd say that there were "cyberpunks" before Gibson.

It's just that the terminology wasn't widespread - until Bruce Bethke's eponymous short story - written before but published after the cinamatic release of the aesthetically-influential Blade Runner - and the prosetylising/self-promotion that followed by the likes of Bruce Sterling.

Nah, it wasn't the creation of a dystopian near-future, where the world looks just like ours but worse. John Brunner had done that in the sixties with The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. There was something in Gibson's attitude that worked for me. I had seen it in his short stories in Omni magazine, which I'd really liked. (Those stories are collected in Burning Chrome.)

A big part of it was his using hustlers and crooks for his protagonists. While a lot of sf stories had been about thieves, they were the sort of character who could have been played by David Niven. The Gibson characters were bad guys, and they were celebrated for it. I didn't realize then that his characters were just as romanticized as David Niven in The Pink Panther. I was so smart and cynical, and Gibson had me targeted perfectly.

Holy smokes! My previous post is completely wrong!

Today I read a 1952 novella by Jack Vance called Abercrombie Station. In it, a beautiful and sociopathic teenage girl is offered a million dollars to seduce, marry, and promptly inherit the fortune of a young billionaire. He lives on an orbital station, which his family owns. She goes there, and the whole place has a sense of madness. The outer ring, a resort community, is inhabited by people who lust after obesity, and many people there would be killed by their own weight if they returned to one gravity. But when she goes into the inner ring, where the family lives, things are really sick.

The story even has a lot of the same attitude as a Gibson story. I'm dumbfounded that Jack Vance had done it thirty years earlier. It's in this collection.

Jack Vance was a brilliant writer. One of my favorites. I don't think I've read Abercrombie Station, though. Mostly I've read his novels, not his shorter stories.

Well that's a weird theme for a collection. Though you sometimes find gems in books like those. Does it include this one story by Orson Scott Card that fits the theme perfectly? It was about a company that used cloning as a type of weight-loss system. The main character was rich, and went through repeated cycles of eating himself into monstrous states of obesity, paying the company to clone a younger fit version of himself, and having all his consciousness and memories transferred to the clone. However, there's a catch:

I had the same question. The Orson Scott Card story Fat Farm is in there. So is The Truth about Pyecraft by HG Wells and Quitters, Inc. by Stephen King.