Polymorphously Creative

The Book-Eater and “Neuromancer”

I eat books.  Statistically, I’ve been finishing a book a week, and at any moment I’m usually in the middle of both a novel and a work of non-fiction.  Also possibly a magazine, which is another concern all together.  For whatever reason, as much and as indiscriminately as I read, I generally don’t read science fiction.  Why, I’m not entirely sure.  I find the genre as a whole pedantic and overly technical for what should be a story; more action than character development and entirely too many laser guns.  If in getting from exposition to denouement any more than half a paragraph is spent describing a spaceship, I’m out.  My own prejudices, however, always yield to a work of critical or cultural importance.  Thus, Neuromancer, by William Gibson, the first book to win the Nebula award, the Philip K. Dick award and the Hugo award got into my library of things to read.  One supposes with that much acclaim Neuromancer would be a standard-bearer in science fiction, and in fact it is a wonderful, well-written story that transcends it’s genre shortcomings in every way.

Describing the plot of Neuromancer would nearly ruin it.  The story unfolds to readers as it unfolds to Case, the main character, leaving all of us in the dark, albeit with a low-powered flashlight.  Though it’s ambiguity is part of it’s charm a short explanation of the premise shouldn’t make it too effortless:

Neuromancer imagines a world where we can interact with cyberspace through a biological interface, similar to the way that we now enter into an alternate reality while dreaming.  Our main character Case is a cyber-thief who stole from his employers and suffered the ultimate consequence: at the outset of the book his nervous system has been permanently damaged, and he can no longer interact with the digital world.  This impediment puts him on the outside of polite society altogether and now Case is a down-and-out drug user in a bad part of town. He owes money,  a price is on his head, and he can trust no one.  The rest is best left to Mr. Gibson’s superior writing.

The writing is of a very high caliber. Neuromancer is a fine work of literature outside of the science fiction genre, an acclimation that can seldom be made - too frequently science fiction falls victim to heavy exposition and an over-explanation of the world the author has imagined.  The genre seems to demand this - how else will readers understand the conventions on which the plot is based? Neuromancer avoids this problem completely, by not addressing the exposition at all.  I spent the first chapter or two of the book assuming an explanation for the new lingo, new gadgets, new geography was coming - the explanation never came and I soon realized I didn’t need an explanation.  On more careful consideration the absence of explanation is logical - Neuromancer is written in the first person, and the main character Case has no need to think about what the Sprawl is, anymore than in my own internal narrative I explain what a shopping mall is.  The absence of exposition then is technically correct and makes for a better novel because the author doesn’t get bogged down explaining setting and foreign technological concepts.  But Gibson doesn’t leave us in the dark - by reading the book and following the plot we understand what “derms” are and what “flatlining” is.  A measure of reading comprehension is the ability to discern the meaning of a word based on the words around it, and Neuromancer is an excellent exercise in this “fill-in-the-blank” literacy logic.

This is a trippy, sexy, subtle novel.  More than once I felt like I was watching a movie because of it’s quick pacing and careful, cinematic attention to action.   The characters are compelling and the mystery that unfolds utterly beguiling.  To the last pages readers are left wondering whether Case is acting as a force for good, or something else all together.  Neuromancer is part of a trilogy, but not so much a part that it cannot be read on it’s own; it ends satisfactorily, but one could still visit the characters again.

I’m not saying that I’m going to run out and corner the market on sci-fi novels.  This one was good; on a scale of one to five, I’d give Neuromancer a solid three.  I am saying, that if I stumbled upon a William Gibson novel at a used bookstore, I’d pick it up and expect to be once again transported into a fascinating, futuristic dystopia.