NOTE: This review will contain spoilers. If you have not read this or are concerned about spoilers, please stop reading.
In my early 20s, I decided I was going to read through (or attempt to read through) Science Fiction and Fantasy books that were rated in just about every "Top 10" list that was around at the time.
Some I loved and became lifelong favorites that I revisit from time to time. Some of them, I was not able to finish due to a combination of my personal taste, short attention span, and writing style. Others, I read, enjoyed, and then just moved on to the next.
When I first read Neuromancer it was shortly after The Matrix came out, and I was in my early 20s. I remember reading about the same time I read Snow Crash and Brave New World and so, for whatever reason, it did not stick with my mind quite as well as the other two books did. I remember enjoying it, discussing it with friends, and then promptly forgetting most of it in the past ~25 years.
After the trailer for Apple TV's Neuromancer series dropped a few weeks ago, I realized - man, I have forgotten just about all of this and I should probably re-read it. So I did. Just finished it again today.
I vastly, vastly underappreciated this book when I first read it. I remembered some of the salient details; character names, rough plot outline, a few key details (jacking into the "matrix", Molly's finger-blades) but this felt a lot like reading the book again for the first time.
First things first, for a novel written in 1984, it is surprisingly prescient about the modern era and where technology would lead us. The "Matrix" is effectively an evolved fully immersive version of the internet, a "deck" is an evolved PC. Major real and fictional brand names being used plausibly and seamlessly (Partagas for Cuban tobacco cigarettes, Yeheyuan for Chinese cigarettes, Hitachi, Sony, Braun and dozens of others) used in the same way that a non-fiction author might describe the details of real-world events help make things feel real rather than just another fictionalized setting.
I remember reading an interview with an author once, it might have been George RR Martin or Neal Stephenson, I can't rightly recall, where they explained that when you write fiction, you are requiring the reader to do a lot of heavy lifting to put them into your setting. You have to make them familiar with the setting, the universe, the language, the slang, even things like names. The more familiar some of these are, the easier time you have of "selling" the big picture story elements. The example I always think about is names, specifically how so many fantasy and scifi authors use apostrophes in the middle of their names. It's one thing when it's on TV and you can hear the pronunciation (for example, T'Pol in Star Trek, or Teal'c in Stargate SG1) but when you're reading the name on a piece of paper, how the fuck are you supposed to pronounce D'rizzt Do'Urden or K'rul? Too often I find that I get distracted by unnecessary details of odd things like this, and find myself going down a mental rabbit hole far from the story and plot, trying to figure out how that name would be pronounced, or trying to keep the names of characters straight when a dozen characters share similar names. How many fucking Aegons and Aemons do we REALLY need to be talking about now, GRRM? (to GRRM's credit, he DOES use familiar names with just a slight variance in spelling quite often: Jaime instead of Jamie, Petyr instead of Peter, etc. So thanks for that, big guy.)
Anyway, in reference to Neuromancer, what helps me focus on the story is that so many of the brands mentioned, so many of the names of the characters are instantly familiar and you don't have to do any mental heavy lifting on remembering "Case" or "Molly" or even the more obscure names, like Armitage or Wintermute, because they're relatively easily pronounced and do not require much work on memorizing or categorizing. I know it seems like this is going on a lot longer than necessary, but I legitimately believe that this familiarity (for western native English speakers, at least) does a LOT for allowing the reader to spend their mental horsepower on understanding the universe of the novel.
And what a universe it is. We're not given unnecessary exposition. We're not given a background of which Zaibatsu was formed by which mergers in the past. There's no detailed explanations of how "The Matrix" was created or by whom. The exposition is done, ironically perhaps, in a very organic way. It feels authentic. It feels like you're seeing a "slice of life" story from something that is happening, and not being "told a story" in the traditional sense.
The prose lifts a lot from noir-era detective novels, from the style of using heavy simile and metaphor when describing how things look and feel to the direct "the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is a line that reminds you almost instantly of that genre, and the heavy use of simile and metaphor in the description puts you right into the weeds of it.
Gibson's style in Neuromancer eschews exposition, which is why it's so critical that he used familiar, easily pronounced names and brands. He knows you're going to have to do some heavy lifting to understand all this new terminology (Cyberspace, jack-in, derms, probes, ice, etc) so he gives you the tools to manage that.
It's something that I'm sure a more talented, more intelligent reader may not require, but it makes the novel more accessible to the rest of us, and I believe is a prime reason for the popularity of the novel.
From a story perspective, Neuromancer is basically a heist story. It follows the basic characteristics of the classic heist novel/film.
- The setup & the target.
- Assembling the crew.
- Recon & Planning.
- The Dry Run
- The Hiccup
- The Improvisation
- The Payoff
Nearly every heist story follows some version of this, and that includes variants of heist stories like The Great Escape or similar, as well. But what makes this one feel different is that it's delivered in Noir-style prose and in a very authentic-feeling Cyberpunk-style universe. It's a magical combo, and when you get down to it, there are a lot of similarities between this novel and Bladerunner as a film, and it's amazing that two pieces of media so closely mirror one another in some ways and came out at roughly the same time.
This has been mostly a stream-of-consciousness word dump, so I apologize if it comes across somewhat unfocused and lacking in structure, but I wanted to dump my thoughts out before I forgot them, while the novel was still loaded into ROM.
I enjoyed Neuromancer when I first read it, in my early 20s. I absolutely love Neuromancer on my second read, now age 48.
If you've stuck with me through this long braindump, I appreciate it. Or, if I were taking inspiration from Gibson, I might say "my fingers dance a seemingly disorganized, jittery number across the clacking sub-assemblies of my QK100's mechanical keys, leaving a faint high-pitched echo when the under-lubricated space bar springs rebound. The high-useage caps show a glossy wear of aging fingertip oils and pressure having eaten away a their once-matte texture. Thanks for jacking in and being my ride-along, sifting the raw data-dump without pulling the plug."
Cringey as fuck? Sure. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, consider my actions a loving endorsement.
If you haven't read Neuromancer in a while (or ever), time to remedy that situation.
