Gibson's Neuromancer has won several awards and endless praise, and Gibson is acknowledged as the founder of cyberpunk. I just finished reading the whole book, but I don't get why it is so important for the sci-fi genre and why it has garnered so many fans. I personally don't like the writing style much, although it serves the purpose of presenting a bleak and noir world. So my question to you is, why is this work and Gibson's writing considered revolutionary in sci-fi? What are your thoughts and impressions of the novel?
My personal take is that Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive seemed to predict the rise of cyberculture in the current modern sense, though the first book would have been written during the Atari Era, a decade before the internet first went live for civilian folk. Gibson himself was nothing but plagued by interviews to the tune of "how did you know this was all coming?" at a time when the rest of Science Fiction was generally heading into a different direction, about to give birth to the whole militarized "high tech warpunk" scene (which was never called that, btw). Gibson is who I constantly quote about the fallacy of Science Fiction predicting the future. And though I can hear the eyerolls already at posting this yet again, here are some of Gibson's thoughts on his own "powers of prediction": From The Paris Review, Summer of 2011: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson
Is Neuromancer what gave birth to things like Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell? Which spawned for instance the recent Westworld reboot? If so, it definitely kicked off some serious trends.
The praise of a thing doesn't bother me, people like what people like even if I don't understand it. However, the little narratives you mentioned do and I'm always glad when people notice. I enjoyed the book, I didn't enjoy its tone but then the tone is exactly what he was going for so I had to just suck it up. Gibson, as good a writer as he is appeals to a very niche demographic of people. One thing that jumped up at me in Neuromancer from the get go is the utter lack of emotion in his lead characters. Some people can handle this and others can't, I don't mind it personally but it's a complaint about his writing I hear repeatedly. For a first effort it was a bloody good one but to me that's all it is. I'm not one for jumping on bandwagons and throwing lofty praise towards what is essentially, entertainment. It reminds me of my first day in Psychology 101. You are told two things from the get go in said class. 1, what Psychology means and 2, '' Sigmund Frued is the grandfather of Psychology '' It's stated as if it's a universal law and that's all there is to it. It's a combination of hyperbole and parroting. Ill give you another example. A while ago, after the Matrix movies came out people kept saying '' No Akira no Matrix, it's that simple '' whenever Akira was brought up in conversation. I was confused for a bit until I walked into a shop and found that they had relaunched an anniversary edition of Akira on DVD. Sure enough the tagline at the bottom? '' No Akira no Matrix, it's that simple '' was scrolled along the bottom. We're a society of taglines and labels it is what it is. If the literary world loves your stuff then they'll wax lyrical even if some of us just don't get it. Good book though.
Blade Runner, the movie, came out a couple years before Neuromancer, and the story it was based on is from the 1960s.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, yeah. All I remember of it is Rick Deckard saying 'I just bought a sheep!'
I did know it was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which I've read), but I also know Ridley Scott took a lot of visual influence from the Heavy Metal magazines and from a book of sci-fi paintings called Mechanismo, so I thought possibly Neuromancer was another influence, on tone or something. Lol, didn't realize Neuromancer came after Bladerunner!
I read the interview, well the portion I was able to read without subscribing. From the interview I enjoyed him describing his writing process the most, I find it fascinating how clear to him his writing process is. I noticed in particular that he says that if an idea doesn't stay with him, it is probably not worthy of taking note of it, and that napping (the state he is when waking up) is essential to his process. I also watched a documentary on cyberpunk he is in it and I agree with quite a few things he says. He does grasp well the underground aspect of non-comformist cyberculture, the desire to subvert, both in the novel and in his ideas. But I still feel I need a lot of explanation to appreciate his novel. I also agree with him that science-fiction is about the present. Actually I never quite understood why people think science fiction is about the future, besides predicting what new technologies will look like and how people will use them, mostly for fun, because in the end you can only describe new future technologies based on how people feel and think now about them. I hadn't quite realized how much people are into prophecies, because I always imagined prophecies to be something medieval (that made sense particularly during the Middle Ages in the way people thought of religion and the confusion of a political system in the midst of wars and change).
I also think there's the facet of how well people are instructed in the art of engaging a story, whether or not they are shown that a story can/should have multiple ports of entry and different levels of narrative communication. We're in a very surface mode right now, very literalized, because we're going through a kind of cultural "life-crisis" where we all feel raw and prickly about how our paradigms - in their many different ways of being engaged (personal, familial, ethnic, sociocultural, etc.) - are under heavy scrutiny. The phrase "purity test" is in brisk play. We have become our own thought police. What was once a spectrum of thought and ideation has been reduced to two hard pantone shades of red and blue and there are no other choices. @Xoic mentioned Bladerunner upthread, a story that invariably ends with people debating as to whether Deckard is a human or a replicant, and the need is very strong for the wave of that question to collapse into a particle and make its choice, the left slit or the right one. We want an answer, not a question, which I find sad because for me the real question is what does the story say differently if he is a human compared to a replicant, what do these differing takes mean to the iconic monologue Roy gives at the end where I think what he is saying to Deckard is that it doesn't matter. To be "real" is to mourn the loss of your experiences when you are gone. Whether your body came from a tank or a uterus is immaterial. The question is not "are you alive?", but instead, "are you living?"
I haven't read Neuromancer. DADoES was unexpectedly minimalist compared to the movie Bladerunner, but I sort of expected that having read PKD's Who Goes There?, on which The Thing was based. I remember kind of liking Androids, but not nearly as much as Bladerunner.
This is exactly what I got from it. Yes, I believe Deckard is a Replicant, and also human. That seemed like the point of the movie to me, and the sequel Bladreunner 2049 began from that premise. Ultimately it seems Replicants are so human (More Human Than Human) there's no telling them apart in any but the most superficial ways. I suppose it has the same theme as Frankenstein*—an artificially produced improvement on Humankind that's so superior it will replace us the way Cro-Magnons replaced Neanderthals, so we react with fear and build in a 4 year lifespan and use them only for off-planet slave labor, and if they show up among us we take up our figurative torches and pitchforks and try to kill them with fire. *The key moment in Frankenstein being when the good doctor was making the creature a mate and suddenly realized if they can reproduce, they'll spread like wildfire—and they're so much hardier than us they'll wipe us out in a few generations. So he destroyed the mate (in the book) before she was complete. This being why the creature killed Victor's bride and began his rampage against everyone he knows and loves.
What I remember on my first read of Who Goes There was how devoid it was of the gut-wrenching gore and horror of the Kurt Russell adaptation. I remember how oddly blasé they were about the cow milk experiment, deducing that the experiment wasn't really valid because the cows could just be copies of such high fidelity that they give perfectly good milk. I don't think the film would or could have included that bit in that tone and remained the same film.
One weird thing that stood out to me about Who Goes There? was that so many characters were named for different kinds of metals. MacReady was called a giant of bronze, there was one named Copper, and the commander was called a man of steel I think. I believe there were even one or 2 more metal-based names. Something odd going on there...
I didn't get the connection with Who Goes There? / The Thing...? I read DADoES waaaay too long ago, I don't remember much, in part because it didn't make an impression on me like other books did, and in part because I was young and didn't pose yet some of the questions that were necessary to explore the book. I did enjoy Bladerunner a lot, it was for a long time one of my favorite movies. I liked how the androids are a metaphor to discuss what is human, how we become human, and how we are made human. Rutger Hauer's improvised monologue resonated with me. It was marvelous to go through that sense of discovery that the movie gave me, especially because I watched while growing up. Now looking back, I see that the umbrella with the neon light seem more one straight out of a book on Japanese inventions that were popular in the 80s and 90s. But they helped, among other things, create a mood. Bladerunner is bleak too, but it's visual style of its noir is captivating. I always wondered about imagining a future so dreadful, where being flooded by technological gadgets (more about consumerism than technology) would shape the world into desolation, and yet that seem necessary to question the human and find meaning in humanity. Anyway, great movie!
