This novel was good. I wanted to suggest it in English 318 when we were listing sci fi / fantasy novels to read as a class. However, I knew that if I did, someone would be offended because it definitely violates honor code standards for BYU sponsored reading material. Despite some of the extremely explicit and violent content, however, this novel was one of the most incredible sci fi stories I’ve read in a long time…
It starts in the not too distant future, where the environment has gone to pot and multinational corporations have more power than states and nations. Bioengineered implants and mechanical body enhancements are cheap, and most people split their lives between two places: the real world, which is increasingly falling apart, and the matrix, a consensual hallucination controlled and managed by computers, which people can jack directly into through mind interfacing technology.
This is basically the book that invented the matrix.
The main character is a down and out matrix cowboy named Case, who had his brain fused in such a way that he can no longer jack into the matrix. With most of his life’s work cut off from him, he cares nothing for himself, and is caught in a spiral of addictions in the Japanese underworld that will ultimately lead to his death. And he doesn’t care.
That changes, though, when he’s picked up by a mysterious man named Armitage and a highly engineered freelance assassin named Molly. Armitage pulls him out of the underworld, fixes his brain, and tells him that he’s working for the big guys now. As a matter of persuasion, he implants a poison in Case that will gradually take away his ability to jack in, and promises to give him the antidote if he cooperates.
Molly and Case are suspicious, however. The people behind Armitage are insanely powerful and are fighting something very dangerous. As their work takes them across the world and out of it, through harrowing and bloody cyber heists and into cooperation with spacefaring Rastafarians and terrorist crime rings, they try to figure out who is pulling the strings behind everything. They gradually realize that someone’s vision for the future went horribly wrong a long time ago, and that some of the greatest powers in the world aren’t human.
This novel was very explicit, very violent and bloody, full of language, and filled even more with drug abuse. It’s definitely not for everyone. There were scenes that I had to skip over, they were so bad. And yet, as a whole, this is undeniably one of the best sci fi books I’ve read in the last two years.
It was a combination of things that made this book good. First of all, the prose itself was extremely well written. It was extremely terse, and the tension was maintained very well. Not only that, but there were several phrases that were just loaded with meaning and imagery. The opening sentence, for example: “the sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” What a way to describe an overcast sky!
Another thing was the setting. It felt a lot more believable to me than a lot of other sci fi stories I’ve read. Looking back, I don’t think that this was because of the way the world was built, but because of the way it was described. Gibson kept the point of view very limited and didn’t stop do explain anything. Some people might be annoyed by this, but for me, it made the world feel a lot less artificial. I really did feel like I was watching Case’s story unfold through his own eyes–not listening to another sci fi author explain the universe he’s built.
The ideas in themselves were fascinating. It makes a lot of sense that humanity in the not so distant future would create a matrix world that they could interface with, for both entertainment and information sharing purposes. Gibson took that idea and explored it in some really interesting ways. He showed how such a construct could lead to a new path in the evolution of crime–and the evolution of humanity. It was fascinating just to explore the world that grew out of those ideas.
As far as the story itself goes, it was very strong. It wasn’t just a “stuff happens, the end” story–far from it. Even though Case was something of an anti-hero, you find yourself rooting for him in a strange way. He’s lost a lot in his life, and perhaps the biggest thing that he’s lost is the ability to feel anything. When he finds himself hating the thing controlling him, he actually feels relief to know that he’s alive. And he’s searching for something: to see his dead exgirlfriend, Linda, even though she knows its impossible. That undercurrent is a key to the story that leads to a meaningful ending, full of mixed emotions and messages. Besides that, the action is just awesome. The story is definitely strong.
Neuromancer is definitely not for everyone. It is a very explicit book. I probably couldn’t tolerate anything any more explicit. But beneath all that was a really good story, and a fascinating world. I can see why this novel launched its own subgenre: it’s definitely a sci fi classic.
