I'll just be here waiting for the uplink
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I'm going to finish the book today and give my full thoughts. I have 61 pages left.
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Ha. Yeah, neuromancer is a book I think I need to read twice.
I'm used to much larger books that go into characters stories over much larger periods of time and distance. But this was different, I said I thought the story started like waking up, not knowing where you are, and picking up the prices as you went along.
The audio book was weird but I think because some of the voices he used sounded basically the same which made it harder to follow. Still better than reading it and crashing.
Good. Be there next time :p
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Neuromancer in its time would have been epic. Having never read it I tried to but I come into it with too much science / tech from now and cringe ?
Is in only me.
I don't see the cringe. But that's coming from someone who likes the theme, thinks things like hackers is a great movie (who cares about the inaccuracies) and plays games heavily influenced by the cyber punk theme.
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I finally finished Neuromancer. Going to the computer soon and write my thoughts.
My thoughts on Neuromancer (Still being edited). @Eden, @gearheadgirl27, @MFZuul
Never has a book infuriated me so much in how it presents itself. I had an extremely hard time trying to understand anything going on in the book and I had to restart the book twice because I had long breaks between reading it. Even after finishing the book, I had to read plot summaries to understand what was going on. None of the major events that happened in the book like how Case and Molly met, Armitage's personality shattering and then died, Wintermute killing the French Turing Police, Case in a alternate reality where Linda Lee is alive, was clear to me nor did it made it engaging. I had zero attachment to the characters and it is not that they are boring (except Armitage), but just that I felt they were not a priority in the story.
Whenever I read a good book, events flow like scenes from a movie in my head. Sure there may be some things I may not understand fully but I can use my imagination to fill the blanks. Think of a jigsaw puzzle. If you get most of the pieces connected, you will have a pretty good idea on what the whole picture is. Neuromancer is not that book however. In terms of a jigsaw puzzle, there were too many huge gaps to make any clear picture of what's going on. If you were ask me what happens in the book, I couldn't give a conclusive answer.
Because I struggle so much with Gibson's writing, I could not appreciate anything else about the book like the parallels to other future works that are based off it, the characters & their motives, etc. Like @Helium_3 said, Gibson writes like a schizophrenic in Neuromancer. It is as if he is deliberately trying to not immerse myself in the world he is envisioning. It is like he wrote the book for only himself to enjoy. I had a way easier time reading a science fiction writer like Issac Asimov and that guy goes hard with the science (because he was a scientist) yet still be clear enough to not lose the reader. Gibson has a loose understanding of the concepts he was envisioning yet didn't put them together in a cohesive way in my opinion.
The first 2/3 of the book was basically Neo-Tokyo worldbuilding pornography as he is trying to give a description of everything going on but using jargon that the common person would not understand. The last 1/3 of the book is where plot and characters start to take priority but I got lost from there.
I have zero interest in rereading Neuromancer nor reading the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy in the near future.
TLDR: Gibson's writing style prevented Neuromancer to be engaging to me whatsoever. Only good thing about the book is that it inspired people to make better cyberpunk stories in the future.
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Huh, I didn't have that problem at all. I thought it was pretty straight forward. Though perhaps it was easier for me as I am a big SciFi nerd and many of lingo/troupes/concepts are familiar to me. Pretty much all you talked about is in the book in black and white tbh
But I know where you are coming from, I've had books given to me that are "the best book ever!" And it is a slog to read do to me not grooving with the writing style. Guess Gibson isn't your jam.
I will say I haven't read many sci-fi books. Ones I could recall are Ender's Game, I' Robot, Tao series by Wesley Chu, a semi-decent sci-fi romance novel called Solar Heat, Brave New World, Hunger games if you want to count that, ... Huh, I haven't read many sci-fi books at all. I'm behind although that really isn't new. I'm behind on everything.
The thing is the book talked about A.I and that shit interests me but Gibson didn't do good job conveying that to me. I didn't mean to make my post black & white because if it wasn't straightforward to everyone, then it wouldn't be successful.
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Oh I'm not knocking ya for it, like I said, how an author writes can pretty much mess a reader up if its just not jiving with them.
It can be intangible and hard to quantify. I read a book one time, forget the name, and just the way the author used commas and how the sentences were set up due to that threw me off.
And I am in no way a authority or master of the written word lol but it pretty much ruined it for me.
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Neuromancer - Thoughts
This is my 2nd time reading it. One thing Gibson does well in this book is world building like the description of the Sprawl. I however would get confused in some parts as to what was going on. I thought it was okay. I did like the sequel better though. I think that is due in part that Gibson had improved on what he had done before.
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Yup
You'll need to copy the audio link and open in a new tab, there working on the Ajax bug.
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Tanks
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I completely agree with you. I felt like Gibson had some how managed to write about characters without caring about them at all. He wanted to tell the story of a theoretical future and here he spent far more effort constructing the settings and atmosphere of the events than he put into character development. Great observation.
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This is especially true of science fiction and of anyone who has ever read "A Clockwork Orange." Rough stuff and you absolutely need something in the story to speak to you if you're going to invest the time to decipher where the author is going.
read most of the thread.now Ive got to read the book.I normally lurk but this looks less than toxic
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If only I didn't leave the discord chat, I think we could have a good back and forth on this. Did you guys talk about the characters and story? I remember I need to download the recording.
I listened to the whole thing in 1 go. not really my cup of tea but i like the thread and am always open to new ideas