Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Novel Background

• Published in 1984
• Won the Nebula and Hugo (as well as the 3rd Philip K. Dick Award, 1st novel to sweep all three)
• The novel almost single-handedly revitalized science fiction in the 1980s
  • After the New Wave, the 1970s did not have a lot to say
  • Various factors caused this:
    • Declining economy
    • Loss of interest in the space program
    • Pollution
    • Endless Global War
  • One question at the time: Did the future lie to us?
    • i.e. was the future we were promised by science fiction just a dream?
  • Gibson’s 1980s work found a way to answer this question in a way that made sense
    • Early stories: “The Gernsback Continuum,” “Burning Chrome,” “Johnny Mnemonic,” and “New Rose Hotel” document a new future aesthetic
    • Reports at the time, suggest that no one had any idea what Gibson was doing
    • Bruce Sterling tells a story of Gibson reading at an SF convention and it was him and a few friends and one random fan. The fan ran out of the room in obvious distress halfway through the reading.
  • Terry Carr, editor at Ace, contracts Gibson for a series highlighting emerging talent.
    • Gibson has one year to write a novel
    • Gibson has no idea how to write a novel
    • Neuromancer is the result
• Neuromancer drew attention to his circle of SF writer friends who came to be known as the cyberpunks and the novel inaugurates the cyberpunk period (which ends with the release of The Matrix in 1999)
  • Group of writers, mainly Gibson, Sterling, Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, and Pat Cadigan, who were obsessed with New Wave (especially Delaney and J.G. Ballard) and The Beat Generation (especially William S. Burroughs)
    • Also influenced by hard-boiled pulp detective fiction
  • They also happened to be obsessed with this new thing called the personal computer
  • Cyberpunk took “inner space not outer space” from The New Wave but applied it to computer networks instead of psychology

Cyberpunk Characteristics

• Combined 80s countercultures:
  • Hardcore, nihilistic punk
  • Survival Research Labs inspired apocalypticism
• With high technology and the language of finance capitalism
• “Low life meets high tech” is one early way people thought about Cyberpunk
• Cyberpunk was a multimedia phenomenon:
  • Movies:
    • Alien
    • Videodrome
    • Blade Runner
  • Music:
    • Most early techno
  • Manga:
    • Akira (1982)
    • Ghost in the Shell (1989)

Characteristics of a Cyberpunk Story

• Often About Computers
• Always about Ambiguous Post-apocalyptic / Dystopian Societies
  • Neuromancer is set after a nuclear war but is not our usual post-nuclear story. The world largely continues.
• Underside of Technological Progress
• Often Obsessed w/ Asian Culture, especially Japan
• Celebrates (or refuses to be horrified by) Radical Body Modification and Post-Embodiment
  • Molly’s implants were initially seen as unsettling to many readers in the 80s

Themes

1. First sentence
   • 1 (“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”)
   • A couple of important things to note:
     • Sky (nature) is compared to a TV screen (artificial)
     • The sky is a dead channel. What could that mean?
     • What does this tell us about the world of Neuromancer
2. Globalization / Authenticity
   • 1 (“The Chatsubo … never hear two words in Japanese”)
   • 21 (“Shin’s pistol … cradled it in his jacket pocket”)
     • Why does this pistol have such a specific history?
     • Copy of a copy, etc.
     • In a world where people are disposable, why does Gibson give us so much detail about objects?
   • 132 (“Okay. We get a cab or something … but it’s mink DNA.”)
   • 136 (“And it was like real? … definitively treelike”)
3. Junk
   • 1 (“The bartender’s smile widened … grubby pink plastic”)
   • 52 (“The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing … He didn’t look back.”)
   • 77-8 (“A thin black child … flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places.”)
4. Meat
   • 6 (“For Case … prison of his own flesh”)
   • 27 (“She shook her head … The nails looked artificial.”)
   • 61-2 (“The abrupt jolt … became the passenger behind her eyes.”)
   • 65-6 (“This was it … jacked in and worked for nine straight hours”)
   • 140-1 (“Motive … but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship”)
   • 255 (“There was a strength that ran in her … the drive held”)
   • 270 (“And found himself … He was looking at himself.”)
     • To my mind, this is the most important moment in the book. Case sees himself through someone else’s eyes. It’s also the only description we get of him in the whole book.
   • 278 (“In the instant … singleness of his wish to die”)
5. Disembodiment
   • 273 (“And he was remembering an ancient story … things could be counted”)
   • 274 (“But you do not know … To live here is to live. There is no difference.”)
   • 279 (“And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but it was his own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he’d always slept, behind his eyes and no other’s.”)
   • 286 (“So what’s the score? … Things are things.”)
   • 287 (“And one October night … was himself”)
6. Insect
   • 32 (“The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.”)
   • 104 (“ Armitage smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect’s antenna.”)
   • 134 (“He’d missed the first wasp … The hive began to buzz”)
   • 135 (“In his mind’s eye … writhing life at his feet”)
   • 183 (“The Finn shrugged … it’ll make you feel better.”)
   • 191-2 (“The ugliness of the door struck … door swung open easily.”)
   • 216 (“Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power … told her they hadn’t”)
   • 231 (“She dreamed of a state … suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness”)
7. Demons
   • 106 (“Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices … as he passed.”)
   • 173 (“You are worse than a fool … aiding this thing to free itself and grow?”)
   • 194 (“Into Maelcum’s stare. … back to his radio module”)
   • 217 (“He’d always imagined … hidden levels of influence”)
   • 250 (“But the dark was total … like magnified circuitry”)
     • Think about this beach sequence in terms of a temptation; Neuromancer offers Case what it thinks he wants
   • 259 (“The boy did a handstand in the surf … A Turing code’s not your name”)
     • The mention of a “true name” relates to the idea that one could control a demon if one learned it’s “true name”

Conclusions

The last four themes (“meat,” “disembodiment,” “insects,” and “demons”) are key to understanding what the novel is doing with computers. We open by learning that Case has a disdain for embodiment but by the end, he seems to have learned something through his experiences. The novel is not as clearly a celebration of the liberatory powers of computing as we may think.

Similarly, note how often the human characters in this story are compared to insect and also how corporate power is compared to an insect hive. On the other side, Neuromancer and Wintermute are the two most human characters in the book. Gibson describes a world in which humans seek to become more machine-like to interface with an economy increasingly determined by cybernetic principles while the computers are striving to become fully integrated humans.

This last point is important to understanding why cyberpunk revolutionized SF: beyond making aliens human, the novel does a lot of work to make machines human and to make the disembodied ideal of online life the new model for a future exploration of the human through technology.