u/stereoactivesynth

I finished reading Gibson's Neuromancer last night. I thoroughly enjoyed every second I spent with this book. The world was dense even with sparse prose, and the struggles and wants of each character unfolded beautifully right through to the end. I think Wintermute might be a top 3 AI for me, and once the purpose of the plot clicked into place (an AI heist on itself to break out of the limitations set on it), I was enraptured til the end and only put it down because I had to do other things.

So of course I came to this sub and searched for other people's thoughts on it. For the most part discussion falls along the lines of

1. The prose is sparse and challenging to some readers, but rewarding and rich once you become immersed in it.
2. The techno-jargon was novel for the early 80s, but maybe feels a bit 'dated' now. However it still works within the fictional world of the Sprawl
3. There's still some debate as to how much of Neuromancer is predictive of our current technological path vs how much we've diverged or simply tried to bring his fictional ideas into existence.

I think point 3 is something really interesting to explore, because how 'accurate' the book is to our current trajectory through information technology seems to vary considerably depending on when you read the book. In the late 80s it looked to be on track, then by the late 90s/very early 2000s it was way off seeing as the internet was highly fragmented and mobile phones were becoming a thing. The 2010s, then, was the beginning of a split-divergence: Some aspects of the book have become truly 'history' (the lack of mobile phones and the way 'cyberspace' is envisioned), whereas others are becoming increasingly relevant. The Tesser-Ashpol family's attempts at biological immortality, in tandem with the development of an AI, is chillingly close to what we're seeing with the rise of cryptofascists vying for control of government behind the curtain and doing everything they can to achieve AGI.

In this way, Neuromancer has swung back around to being a really good prediction of where things might be headed. It would have been very difficult for someone in 2013 to see how things have turned out now, so they would've taken Gibson's ideas as just some alternative history that would never happen - something I call the 'flying car future', which is distinct from the future that actually has the potential to happen.

So this means that Neuromancer is both important and interesting to read as a prediction of things that may yet happen, and as a setting which makes us reason with our place within that world. The world of the Sprawl is full of indivudals - humans - who are lost and 'secondary' to the technology that has evolved around them. Biology and psychology playing catchup with the onslaught of silicon and plastic. It makes me wonder just how bad things could get. By no means is everything wrong with Gibson's future world, but it's clearly meant to feel alien and disconnected from any kind of grounding human experience so as to warn us that all of the data in the world means nothing without legitimate connection.

That's hammered home brilliantly with the design of Straylight, which comes across as spot-on description of the LLMs we're surrounded with now. An endless maze of reality warped and re-assembled with basically no understanding or attention paid to why things existed in the first place, why their context was important, and why displacing them removes their value entirely. Like an AI-generated Mona Lisa pulling a duckface to take a selfie with a wonky iPhone.

There's also some discussion I've seen that after reading Neuromancer, many people working in computer tech actually wanted to make his fiction into reality. This is very 'Torment Nexus' territory, and it worries me that the wrong lessons will be taken from his world.

I recently finished reading China Mieville's The City and the City and was very impressed with the conceptual framework he came up with to surround the plot. Two cities that are 'grosstopically' adjunct but perceptually, politically and culturaly bisected. That's such a brilliant setting, that you'd almost believe it wasn't possible to have a failed narrative take place within it.

Unfortunately I found that the plot really does start to fall apart a bit the deeper into the concept we get. By the end we're just listening to characters spout exposition and both spawn and solve mysteries immediately. Much of the slow reveal and pondering pace from the first 80% of the novel is abandoned. The plot ultimately gets resolved in a couple of fairly cliche monologues from the protag, an antagonist (who we'd largely forgotten about), and a third character of interest who the book circled around but never fully delved into.

Despite the narrative sprint the fun concepts do keep cropping up, though; we get some insight into how Breach could exist as a third party; or how a citizen can walk the imperceptable border and end up in all but no places at once; or the glimpses of technology (and artefacts) that suggest something far more advanced than the world is ready for. These are all thrilling to read, but just float up then drift away with little impact after a few paragraphs. I really could've done with some characterisation of the implications. 30 more pages, even, would satisfy.

There is also the issue of prose. Mieville's is a bit stilted, giving us very little to really bite into. The occassional, tame flourish here and there was nice but for the most part what we read on the page is what we get.

So it seems to me that what China Mieville had here was an excellent concept, one which was begging to exist as a full-fleshed setting, but he struggled to find a way to make a plot that naturally explores each of its elements in enough depth.

So overall I enjoyed it, and have taken a lot away from it, but just wished the journey through was more thoughtfully composed and had a more interesting destination.