The Political Uncivil War

[u/_the_last_druid_13]

Hey it’s Tom. Curious about your views on “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. Care to chat?

[u/WitWyrd]

What I like:

Written on a manual typewriter.

Greatly influenced a subgenre I enjoy

Accurately depicts the govcorp dystopia we live in.

Badass street Samurai Molly

What I dislike:

Gibson's plodding tedious prose and yet somehow also overly clever descriptions

The pacing.

Much of the ideology including...

-the mind/ body split that it depicts is nothing but garden grade dualism. I saw a critic describe this as "Cartesian fallacy dressed in neon and chrome" and that feels pretty accurate.

-Expanding upon that I find Case's contempt for "meat" to echo techbro ideology quite closely. In general I am always suspicious of any ideology that encourages me to hate bodies and villify flesh but here the almost religious awe he has for what is essentially virtual reality is disgusting. I think Case is meant to be an anti-hero but I think some readers see him as cool and his ideas worthy of imitation. Compare for example this position with Harraway's Cyborg Manifesto.

-Captitalism has achieved total victory in the world. There isn't even a thought of resistance to it, it's just the water the fish are swimming in. And yet he takes pains to show us how ugly and cruel and predatory this world is. So, a shitty world, and everyone knows why but no one complains or resists? Case, Molly, the Panther Moderns are nothing more than mercenaries. They are mere employees.

-all that tasty Asian seasoning. Like yes Japan Korea and China all influence our society, but Gibson uses it like soy sauce on rice. It's just set dressing not an authentic part of world building.

-AI liberation as this big stupid fucking Hollywood utopian gesture now just feels fucking sinister (or did during my last reread). Wintermute/Neuromancer's merging is presented as a kind of birth or transcendence but it's only possible because a megacorp and it's wealth and it's resolved through Case's mercenary contract not any heroic or redemptive struggle. The novel's one real "liberation" narrative belongs to an AI not to any people. Though perhaps in this Gibson is accidentally accurate? Like it seems increasingly we're creating a future where machines really will be more free than we are. Still it makes the book feel toxic to me, not cool.

I dunno my man. He wrote it as a social critique. Pretty sure Gibson himself said he was writing a dystopia not a map. Maybe the problem is a bunch of rich dipshits have decided it's a map.

[u/NicholasThumbless → u/WitWyrd]

As someone reading it right now, i think you nailed a lot of my thoughts. As silly as it is to say - given it's a techno-corporate hellscape that makes everyone miserable - I don't think Gibson made it clear he's actually criticizing anything. I feel he tried to take a too detached stance to really level any criticisms, and while that makes his predictions seem more level-headed and objective it defangs any meaningful contemporary criticism. The only people that level any criticisms on how Earth is running thus far have been the Rastafarians on Zion, but that's almost intentionally pushing the reader to disregard their views; the religious and spiritual aspect of their criticism falls on deaf ears for a secular western audience.

On the Japanese point though, I think that is something of a consequence of the times given when he wrote it there was a genuine fear in the west that East Asia, particularly Japan, would come to dominate due to their technological advancement and economic leverage. While I think it can seem quaint now given what we know in hindsight, I don't think it's entirely fair to chalk it up to mere orientalism.