Neuromancer

Neuromancer, a cyberpunk novel written by William Gibson, is one of those classics that had lost its novelty over the years. I didn't find it special, having already been exposed to all the works that were influenced by it; it was just more stuff I was already familiar with. I think I was kind of blind to all the words and concepts Gibson may have invented too. I have to trust the word of others that this fabled, the sole Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Hugo Award triple winner was that remarkable at the time of its publishing.

The novel's protagonist is Henry Case, a hacker who made the mistake of crossing his employer. Case was punished with a nervous system damaging mycotoxin that made him unable to jack into cyberspace. Barred from what he was good at, Case wastes his time using and dealing drugs.

He gets pulled from his suicidal spiral by a former US special forces operative Armitage who offers a cure in exchange for Case's skills. Another Armitage hireling is Molly who is responsible for security. Razorgirl, as Case calls her.

There is a bunch of globetrotting, even a trip to space. Artificial intelligence becomes a big plot element as Case and Molly eventually discover who Armitage really is and what they're doing for him.

An amusing detail for me in the novel was Finland's surprise appearance. I think Finland and Helsinki made for an interesting location during the Cold War times as it was the closest "safe harbor" for operations headed into the hostile-to-West Soviet Union. Finland is right next to now-Russia yet wasn't a part of the Eastern Bloc.

Thinking about Neuromancer now, I think the novel was better than the impression I got on my first read. The story has a huge amount of cool details and characters. What probably hampered my experience is that I found the novel a considerably difficult read. That was partly because I read it in English and my vocabulary simply wasn't enough for Gibson's flowery prose. I was bothered by there being so many words whose meaning I didn't exactly know. I should re-read the book at some point -- perhaps in Finnish.

I think Gibson also structures his sentences in a difficult to read manner. The print of Neuromancer I read happened to be a 20th anniversary edition that includes a foreword by the author (which is always nice) and already in that I had to really concentrate on what I was reading.

In the foreword Gibson laments the numerous anachronisms in Neuromancer. He begins by claiming that even at the time of the novel's release in 1984, readers didn't necessarily understand its opening line as he had intended.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Apparently dead channel can mean a blue or black screen to people, but at least to me that is like Gibson's intended silvery black and white. He also mentions the lack of cellphones in the book and in general his predictions not really hitting the mark. Gibson felt he did better with stuff he had no clue about. Maybe it was because of the anachronisms that Neuromancer felt old to me, not as timeless as, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The book also has an afterword (nice as well) by Jack Womack, another science fiction author who also happens to know Gibson personally. Among other things, Womack frowns at the commercialized cyberpunk genre, saying Gibson didn't invent it nor its catchy moniker, instead shying away from it after the fact. He also says that scifi authors often take guesses how future unfolds and technology advances, sometimes getting it right, but rarely do they get to shape it like Gibson, he suggests. Womack credits the term cyberspace to Gibson.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.