Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)
Author: William Gibson
Rating: â 1/5
Date Read: 2014/09/16
Pages: 288
I cringe when I hear someone say that a book is a classic of science fiction. What they mean is that the book has been well liked by a narrow subset of readers, without any real value to elevate it out of a genre and into the realm of literature. Neuromancer is supposed to be both revolutionary and incredibly well written, but it doesnât live up to the hype. Instead, it rehashes a simplistic yet still absurd noir plot with two-dimensional characters and a style so unnecessarily befuddling that it renders the book almost unreadable.
This purported âclassicâ of science fiction consists mostly of nonsensical techno-drivel punctuated by unexpected graphic sex. For example âCase flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing down the crimson thread that pierced the library ice.â Itâs hard to tell whatâs going on here, because the technology that Gibson created donât consist of anything more than of a sloppy vomit of invented jargon. I canât tell how prescient the technology was, because itâs hard to make any sense of it at all.
And the plot. It starts out promising: a hacker who got banned from cyberspace after screwing over an employer gets one last chance to work, but the job is shrouded in mystery. It stays interesting for about two chapters, and then becomes completely absurd. At one point, the whole crew randomly ends up in space, and we meat a brand new hackneyed Rastafarian character who actually says, and I quote, âYou verâ pale, monâŠmaybe you wanâ eat somethinâ.â Which just made me think of this:
The only consentual mass hallucination going on here is that of the mainstream science fiction apologists, who put forward books like Neuromancer, Foundation, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as if they could stand up to the likes of Anna Karenina, Ulysses, or even Pride and Prejudice. They canât. I donât mean to imply that Iâm turned off of the genre forever, but Iâm done expecting these âclassicsâ to hold their own as literature. Suits me well enough, anyway: Iâve always found Science Fiction to be at its best when it doesnât take itself too seriously.