Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I made it to the end! I'm not sure I know what happened in this book. I know that Case got head hunted for a job and got 'fixed' to not have a drug addiction. An AI wants to be 'real' other than that im not really sure.

This one was a little to sci-fi for my tastes. I had to spend a lot of the book glancing at the Wikipedia page to help me understand all the threads and back stabbing and who was who. I still don't think I was successful. I'm happy that I read it but I'm not keen on books that make me feel dumb and books and that I have to concentrate so hard on just to understand what is going on. For me reading is meant to be relaxing.

I fully agree. I'm about 65% in and have no idea what is going on apart from the things you just named. I also don't care about the characters whatsoever, and have probably for that reason given up on backtracking things.

I did not like this book at all when I read it before, like you two I had no clue what was going on.

Keep in mind that this book was absolutely ground-breaking on its release in the mid 80s. As such it is more about ideas than characters or story. And obviously the ideas have been done to death since then so a modern reader doesn't even get the wow factor.

I'm about 75% done but I've read this before several years ago. Remember as Ryan said this book came out in 1984 and predates the (commercial) internet. Cyberspace is an old term now this is one of the places it originated. Its easy to see this book influenced a lot of people and of course the writers of the Matrix movies. This was a book before its time. It is a hard to read book, he invented new terms, and tech-speak. Some of it actually earned widespread use. Some of it not so much. Personally i believe this book has some actual poetry, and some stuff I never need to read again. All in all I like it.

One of my absolute favourite books, reread it many times over the years :)

Has one of my favourite openings for a book too, "The sky was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel". I've thought about that a bit the last few times i've read this book - I wonder how long it'll be before new readers of the book think that means the sky is blue...

Tony wrote: "I'm about 75% done but I've read this before several years ago. Remember as Ryan said this book came out in 1984 and predates the (commercial) internet. Cyberspace is an old term now this is one of the places it originated."

I attended a library seminar a few years ago. The rather snarky college professor facilitating wanted us to give him titles of any SF books that really were predictive in nature. He proceeded to shoot down all the examples offered as nothing more than mere extrapolation. I threw him the notion of Neuromancer predating cyberspace. He was reluctant to accept it, but really had no choice, given the date of publication.

Ryan wrote: "Keep in mind that this book was absolutely ground-breaking on its release in the mid 80s. As such it is more about ideas than characters or story. And obviously the ideas have been done to death si..."

I completely agree about it being ground breaking. Just reading through some of the stuff on Wiki about it was amazing but I found that it was just too technical for me. All the tech speak did for me was mask the story and make it very hard to follow.

I can clearly see that he was way ahead of his time, able to set up a believable future and that this book was very influential. The first few chapters I really liked and set this up to be a great book (apart from the sex scene between Case and Molly... I must have missed something. How did that happen? They just slept together because they were in the same room?). But I have no idea how to picture anything related to cyberspace, and most of the terms uses don't make any sense to me. Its a shame, cause I know I could quite like it otherwise.

I'h read this book many times and love it, but it is hard to understand at first. This book gives more plesure at second read then the first!

This thread doesn't seem to be linked to the book. As in, our ratings don't show up next to our name. Normally there is a line at the top of the thread "This topic is about [book title]", e.g. /topic/show/...

I can agree that's it's groundbreaking and cool in that fashion, but if I can't understand what's going on then it's hard for me to see that to it's fullest extent.

Which parts did you find hard to understand?

I work with computers and technology even I agree there's a lot of jargon that's hard to understand. I see that. I agree this book is better on the second read. This was one of my favorite quotes.

"He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now-
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky."

Nick wrote: "Which parts did you find hard to understand?"

I read this a while ago so don't know specific parts per se, but I remember being lost just about the entire book.

I also work in a technical field.

Roger wrote: "Nick wrote: "Which parts did you find hard to understand?"

I read this a while ago so don't know specific parts per se, but I remember being lost just about the entire book."

Perhaps because the concept was so novel, the language lagged far behind the ideas.

Another reason it might be a bit difficult to understand is that Gibson had little practical knowledge of the technology he talked about. . He knew so little about the technology at the time, he created large portions in order to construct an atmosphere and explore various ideas about the technology. This can easily lead to a disconnect due to the outdated or incorrectly used terms for different technologies.

That's true. Hacking is never depicted as just some dude tapping away at a command line. It's always these big dramatic 3D GUIs. Although I am reminded of Richard Pryor in that Superman movie, 'hacking the mainframe' on his first brief touch of a keyboard.

The past is so cute sometimes.

Say, how many of you have actually seen " the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"? 0:)

I'm old enough to remember. Still makes me think of Carol Anne.

"They're he-ere!"

Mary wrote: "Say, how many of you have actually seen " the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"? 0:)"

TVs today don't display static, just that pale blue. Carol Anne.... Carol Anne lol...

It seems like there are two issues that people have with the book. One is the language. Gibson invents so many new terms that it's hard for the reader to keep up. He also uses a lot of obscure existing vocabulary; where have you ever seen "hypnagogic" before?

The language in the book is one issue, however, there's a separate issue with the plot. The plot involves crosses and double-crosses, and various factions/power groups pursuing different goals. It gets hard for the reader to keep track of all the players on the field and what they're up to.

The first issue is a science-fiction issue. The second issue has more to do with the novel's noir influences. The plot issues are more typical of a hard-boiled detective story with set-ups, twists, and crosses.

You should write reviews Mark.

Ryan wrote: "You should write reviews Mark."
I don't feel like anyone would read them.

I'm sure someone would. I read loads of reviews.

Is anyone else a fan of Iain M. Banks' work, like THE PLAYER OF GAMES? I've devoured every thing he wrootein this genre and grieve his passing.

Nick wrote: "Which parts did you find hard to understand?"

I really struggled with the whole concept of 'Dixie Flatline'.My first impression was that they had 'saved his personality' which is a nice idea, but then he seemed to be able to interact with the people and surroundings which means that he is more than just a saved personality right? If he can help in situations that he hadn't be around for then surely he is more than a memory? So is he no a hologram like Rimmer from Red dwarf?

The second thing was the idea of an AI having a split personality and seeming to want two different outcomes to happen.

The idea of the Tessier-Ashpool confused me too. Is it a family? a business? both? Is Icebreaker a program to overcome a firewall?

It almost feels like I'm either increadibly stupid? I didnt read it properly? or my version missed out some key explanations. I just feel like I still have no idea what happened and actually who got what they wanted.

I wouldn't feel stupid, it's a complicated story and I'm nearly certain I didn't understand it all on the first, or even second read through :)

The concept of digitising a person was fairly new then, though it's been explored a lot in novels since (Accelerando by Charlie Stross and Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan both play on this idea).

Imagine waking up one day and you have no body. You feel the same, think the same, have the memories, but you're in a computer now - that's sort of what Gibson was getting at with the Flatline.. it's more than just a memory simulation, al la A Talent for War, but as a rom construct the implication is he can't change or grow "in the box" that he's stored in, it's read-only. Case gets around this by hooking him up to the volatile memory of his cyberdeck, giving him the ability to remember things from that point onwards and grow like a regular human.

Gibson seems to get the terminology a bit confused, but basically he's showing Dixie as a "man in a machine" - with the further implication that, like Wintermute, he ends up free and living in the matrix.

The AI didn't so much have a split personality as there were two different AI's created, both with traits that made them less than the sum of their parts. Neuromancer had a full personality, and could read "copies" off people and store them in a way similar to the Flatline. Wintermute seems to have had more analytical and predictive abilities.

It's not flat out stated, but implied that 3Janes mother intended to have herself digitised and live forever on that beach where Neuromancer kept a copy of Linda Lee and tried to trap Case in to prevent him finishing the run. She designed the AIs however to be able to merge and become. What they become isn't ever stated, but something more, free in the matrix, a new order of life - and dealt with in more detail in Count Zero from memory.

Tessier-Ashpool was a company, technically publically listed by with all its stock vested fully in members of the family. A family owned company, or as suggested in the book, a family run as a company. They own the freeside space station, live primarily in the villa straylight, and held as a sort of family obsession the idea of living forever. All but 3Jane's mother via cryogenics, "hopping" through time and living only a short while before going back in the tanks.

ICE, one of many terms coined in this novel but later used a lot in cyberpunk literature, stands for Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics. Roughly, the idea is they are programs running in cyberspace, on the servers, that detect intrusion attempts and either prevent access (like a firewall) or directly attack the hacker (black ice) trying to cook their brains or flatline them. An icebreaker is a program used to defeat the ice, slip around them or wipe them out, allowing the hacker to access where they shouldn't.

As an aside, a currently published card game, Android: Netrunner, provides a modern take on this, with one player building up servers and ice to protect them, and the other player taking the role of a hacker like Case, using icebreakers to get through the ice and steal what's on the server.

Hope that helps, rather than making things harder to understand :)

Cheers Nick. A good explanation of the vagaries in this book.

Nick that clears up a lot for me. Thanks muchly. I cant say that I will go back and re read it any time soon though.

Thanks for the right up Nick, I got almost none of that when i read the book, what you wrote sounds like a great novel, I might have to try one of the other novels you mentioned.

Happy to help guys :) Neuromancer I think is a book that rewards rereading if you liked it enough. A lot of what is going on is hinted at rather than specifically stated, and it can be hard to follow some of his made-up technology and terminology (though a lot of it has become standard now amongst cyberpunk fans).

Altered Carbon I read a little while back, first in a series. It's a very interesting cyberpunkish book, dealing with using digitised copies of people as "backups" and how things world where death of the body doesn't necessarily mean death of the self, and where putting on a new body can be as common for some as putting on a new suit of clothes.

I'm not reading the entire thread just yet as I'm only on page 76 right now. I figured this would be a quick read since it's a fairly short book but I'm having to reread passages all the time trying to glean some context out of the sentences. I'm used to books with rather steep learning curves but this one is really giving me a hard time. Anyway, I'll keep plugging along. I get the general idea of what's happening but the specifics are hazy.

I agree with what Nick said. He expressed it far better than I could. When Case was jacked in, I pictured him inside the machine, like Tron if anyone remembers that movie, and Dixie the same way, only Dixie can't leave. I confess I had to read it twice because the first time I felt like I was dropped inside some alien world I knew nothing about, almost like my book was missing the beginning where everything was explained. But reading it the second time it was much, much better. I believe it would probably get better with every successive read (up to a point) if one would have the time and inclination to do so.
Another book that kind of reminds me of digitizing the human consciousness is Lock In. In that book a chip is implanted in the human brain and the consciousness can be transferred to a mechanical body. There are nuances involved in that book that I won't get into at this time, but I liked that book also.
I made a resolution to start writing book reviews for my read books again in 2016, and sadly I am way behind. I do however have a review for Neuromancer. This book was cutting edge when it was written and I would strongly recommend it to any science fiction fan.

/review/show...

Finished! That was a very helpful explanation, Nick, and it's more or less what I gleaned from the story. Certainly, movies like The Matrix, Tron and even Underworld (which also had leaders of the vampire family/clans who were only awoken for certain periods) helped me to picture what was going on. It would have been an even bigger struggle without that cinematic memory. I'm a visual person so I need those cues!

I think it would have been even harder to grasp when it was released, long before movies like the Matrix had been conceived. Still, that's probably part of the reason it had the impact that it did ;) Neuromancer, along with its sequels and the stories in "burning chrome" really did define an entire genre - and though "Cyberpunk is dead" is a popular refrain amongst some since the mid nineties, the spirit of it never really died - it just flowed into the mainstream genre consciousness and was absorbed much like everything else ;)

Nick: Is there a book that you would recommend as a middle ground between the cyperpunk of Neuromancer and more 'straight forward' sci fi? (hope that makes as much sense written as it does in my head).

There are a few that come to mind, a cyberpunk flavour but perhaps not as hard to get into...

Altered Carbon is the one that springs immediately to mind, as I mentioned earlier. It's the first in an excellent set of crime/thriller sci-fi novels with a definite cyberpunk flavour. They deal deeply with the digitised mind idea - the key conceit is that everyone is implanted with a "cortical stack", which is basically a backup of your mind. If you are killed, but the stack remains intact, you can be brought back in a new body. The really rich go a step further and have cloning facilities with constant mind backups, so even if your stack is destroyed you lose at most 24 hrs of memory.

There is some deep and fascinating world building around this concept, and how it would affect society - from customised bodies for soldiers and the rich, to religious groups viewing it as an abomination, to one particular cult that sees true digitisation and the casting off of flesh bodies as the next step in human evolution.

When Gravity Fails is another that springs to mind, more contemporary of Neuromancer than altered carbon. It is set in an arabic country (can't be more specific sorry, I read it a long time ago) and again has a bit of a cyberpunk flavour from the use of "persona mods". Chips that people slot into their heads to completely change their personalities. Again, some very interesting ideas.

Hardwired is another classic of the genre, dealing with the idea of wiring your brain into your transport, hovertanks in this case I think, in order to control the vehicle as an extension of your own body. Another one I haven't read in a long long time, I think it was about smuggling.

The Electric Church is one I read recently with a slightly cyberpunkish vibe. More punk, less cyber - but the core conceit of the books deals with the idea of uploading minds into robot bodies. The main character is a hired killer in a rather nasty capitalist dystopia, it's dark but good.

Snow Crash is another one i'd recommend - It's a brilliant book. It usually gets shelved with cyberpunk but i've never been all that sure. More cyber, less punk you could say - it's hilarious in parts, a lot more light hearted and a much easier read, but it's definitely classic science fiction exploring a balkanised united states divided up into "franchise citizenships", where pizza is delivered by the mafia and corporate enclaves litter the landscape, offering protection to their 'citizens'.

Snow crash deals a lot with neurolinguistic programming as it's big idea. It's a great deal of fun.

I think any of those might be a good next step if you're interested in exploring the genre. If you're looking for something a lot easier to understand, Snow crash is probably the way to go. A good mix of complex, fascinating ideas and just flat out "wow awesome" sci fi ;)

Thanks Nick, Altered Carbon is one of my favourites (I have the signed special edition) but a few others you mentioned are still on my reading list and you've just added a few more :-)

Those all sound very interesting, Nick. I already own The Electric Church so now I have a good reason to move it up on my TBR list.

For all that I wasn't always 100% sure what was going on this story, I did like it. For myself though, I'm quite happy just being meat. :-)

Nick wrote: "There are a few that come to mind, a cyberpunk flavour but perhaps not as hard to get into...

Altered Carbon is the one that springs immediately to mind, as I mentioned earlier. It's ..."

I enjoyed Altered Carbon and Snow Crash as well.

So in looking at my TBR shelf, I discovered that I had already marked Altered Carbon as "to read" even though I couldn't remember doing it. Then I noticed that I also had it on my "book to tv/movie adaptation" shelf. Apparently Netflix has picked it up as a straight to tv series (10 episodes), though no launch date as of this article.

Only problem is that my reading list is being added to faster than I can actually read the books!

That is a constant problem for me too Dawn, especially since Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ has gotten so good at recommending similar books ;)

I'll have to keep an eye out for an Altered Carbon tv show, that could be very good to watch. I haven't had a chance to check out The Expanse yet (based on Corey's excellent Space Opera series) but it's supposed to be good.

I'm still waiting for the Neuromancer movie that's been announced a dozen times over the years but never appeared ;)

Nick wrote: "There are a few that come to mind, a cyberpunk flavour but perhaps not as hard to get into...

Altered Carbon is the one that springs immediately to mind, as I mentioned earlier. It's ..."

Thank you for all of these. Will give one or two a go at some point.

Milou wrote: "I can clearly see that he was way ahead of his time, able to set up a believable future and that this book was very influential. The first few chapters I really liked and set this up to be a great ..."

Lol! I felt the same way about this sex scene. I was thinking...and people give YA books a hard time about instalove?

Susan wrote: "Is anyone else a fan of Iain M. Banks' work, like THE PLAYER OF GAMES? I've devoured every thing he wrootein this genre and grieve his passing."

I haven't yet but it sounds fascinating. It's on my huge TBR pile.

I just finished listening to this last night. It took me a LONG time to get through this book. I'm going to paste my GR review below.


For such an interesting premise, I was amazed at how difficult it was for me to read this. I slogged through listening to this on audiobook for about two and a half weeks. It took every act of willpower for me to force myself to listen to this. If it were not for it being a BOM for a bookclub I am in, I would definitely have DNFd this book a few chapters in.

I had a feeling that this book would be difficult for me to read despite being interested in the book's synopsis. I didn't particularly enjoy reading Snow Crash either, which is also a cyberpunk novel, so I guess I should have been more prepared.

Maybe it was the techno jargon which infused itself into every page that left me confused and disoriented; maybe it was the characters who feel so bland and lifeless- their dialogue often sounding like some B rated action movie. Maybe it was the complete lack of urgency for me within the plot despite it focusing heavily on fast-paced action. I just frankly never card what happened.

It was not a terribly written book, though. And reading the Wikipedia summary along with reading the story made it slightly easier to follow along when I felt myself falling down the rabbit hole of incomprehensibility. But an occasional clever turn of phrase wasn't nearly enough for me to rate this book higher when it felt like a lot of work for me to finish reading this book.

If you like cyberpunk a lot, and I do mean a lot, then you might enjoy this book. Otherwise I would pass on reading this one.

Christina wrote: "Lol! I felt the same way about this sex scene. I was thinking...and people give YA books a hard time about instalove?"

I often struggle with instalove - The daniel faust novels, which i'm otherwise enjoying, place quite a lot of motivation in a relationship of this sort that I had real trouble buying into.

In this case though, I don't think love has much of anything to do with it. There wasn't anything particularly romantic between them, though Case does grow fond of her later in the book Molly always remains standoffish. It's established fairly clearly, particularly later with her revelations about her meat puppet days, that she has a very relaxed attitude to the physical, and it certainly served her immediate purposes - she begins enlisting Case's help after this in investigating Armitage and trying to figure out what was behind a deal that made no sense.

It's also mentioned later that Case reminds her of Johnny, a man she was in love with that was killed for doing similar things to what got Case's nervous system burned out. As an interesting aside, she's referring to Johnny Mneumonic there, of movie and short story fame (his story is in burning chrome.)

Christina - Looks like you had much the same reaction to Neuromancer that I did to Bone Clocks ;)

I rather liked Molly and wanted her to stick around. I get why she didn't though. The hopping into bed right away didn't bother me. I hate instalove in books (it's why I don't read anything from the romance genre if I can help it) but I didn't see this as instalove. It was just sex between two people who mostly treated it as a way to pass the time. Though I do agree that by the end they had both developed a fondness for each other.