A review by mayoroffailure
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
3.0
Neuromancer is a book that is extremely hard to review, and in some ways I don't even really know if this is a book at all. In most cases a novel will follow a standard three act structure with characters, a plot, and some sort of conclusion to the overall story; Neuromancer has almost none of that.
Yes there are characters, but there are too many, yes there is a plot, but its jumbled and makes little sense, yes it has a story with a conclusion, but it's cryptic and offers little resolution. Now I'm all for ambiguity, if you read my review of And Then There Were None then you'll know that I thought that book would be better with more ambiguity; But just like any other literary device ambiguity has to be used correctly, and Neuromancer doesn't explain enough to have a normal plot and explains too much to be considered ambiguous.
So if it isn't a book in a traditional sense then what is it? Well I personally think that Neuromancer is a collection of Mr. Gibson's musings of the future. It's a novel that predicted cyberspace, hacking, and so many other technological inventions that its a prophecy of the future, an explanation of things to come. We as society move closer and closer to synthetic drugs, just last year four major corporations were hacked, Anonymous continues to do their thing against groups they find corrupt, we are getting closer and closer to artificial intelligence, and cities continue to get overcrowded and densely packed.
On the basis of predicting the future Neuromancer gets a grade A but on the basis of a novel it falls short of it's expectations. The plot is so scrambled that it's difficult to understand what is going on in the long term but if you examine what goes in the short term, specific events and passages, then it makes complete sense. I honestly cant even really explain what the task force in this novel was attempting to do, I know they were trying to hack into a corporation but the purpose still remains shrouded for me.
The same can be said for the characters, you have the mainstays like Case, Molly, Armitage, and a couple of others but Mr. Gibson throws so many more in. All of the main characters have excellent characterization and all have distinct voices but there are so many randy's that get no characterization and have no distinct voice that I cant honestly tell them apart or tell you what their purpose was.
These are the biggest issues with the novel, the fact that it's written without detail. Instead, Mr. Gibson paints with broad strokes, giving us a vision of the future more than an actual plot, he fills the canvas but offers no detail. It's a concept that works here but I doubt could work anywhere else, if anything I think Mr. Gibson probably should have made this a collection of short stories. Those stories could have offered him a more digestible route for his broad strokes.
The world of Neuromancer is, in more ways than one, the world we live in today. It's not really a dystopia but instead a neon covered lens of our future society. We may not be that far down the track but were only a couple of stations away, and that thought terrifies me.
Yes there are characters, but there are too many, yes there is a plot, but its jumbled and makes little sense, yes it has a story with a conclusion, but it's cryptic and offers little resolution. Now I'm all for ambiguity, if you read my review of And Then There Were None then you'll know that I thought that book would be better with more ambiguity; But just like any other literary device ambiguity has to be used correctly, and Neuromancer doesn't explain enough to have a normal plot and explains too much to be considered ambiguous.
So if it isn't a book in a traditional sense then what is it? Well I personally think that Neuromancer is a collection of Mr. Gibson's musings of the future. It's a novel that predicted cyberspace, hacking, and so many other technological inventions that its a prophecy of the future, an explanation of things to come. We as society move closer and closer to synthetic drugs, just last year four major corporations were hacked, Anonymous continues to do their thing against groups they find corrupt, we are getting closer and closer to artificial intelligence, and cities continue to get overcrowded and densely packed.
On the basis of predicting the future Neuromancer gets a grade A but on the basis of a novel it falls short of it's expectations. The plot is so scrambled that it's difficult to understand what is going on in the long term but if you examine what goes in the short term, specific events and passages, then it makes complete sense. I honestly cant even really explain what the task force in this novel was attempting to do, I know they were trying to hack into a corporation but the purpose still remains shrouded for me.
The same can be said for the characters, you have the mainstays like Case, Molly, Armitage, and a couple of others but Mr. Gibson throws so many more in. All of the main characters have excellent characterization and all have distinct voices but there are so many randy's that get no characterization and have no distinct voice that I cant honestly tell them apart or tell you what their purpose was.
These are the biggest issues with the novel, the fact that it's written without detail. Instead, Mr. Gibson paints with broad strokes, giving us a vision of the future more than an actual plot, he fills the canvas but offers no detail. It's a concept that works here but I doubt could work anywhere else, if anything I think Mr. Gibson probably should have made this a collection of short stories. Those stories could have offered him a more digestible route for his broad strokes.
The world of Neuromancer is, in more ways than one, the world we live in today. It's not really a dystopia but instead a neon covered lens of our future society. We may not be that far down the track but were only a couple of stations away, and that thought terrifies me.