For me, reading this book was like playing Dark Souls: you're dropped into the middle of things without any explanation, but gradually as the story progresses, you pick up bits and pieces that allow you to put together an idea of what's going on. You never have the complete picture, but the more you dig the more you know. I definitely want to re-read it with the benefit of having finished it once already.
I was also very lost when reading this book, doubting that I was understanding what was going on, but I sensed my confusion would pay off in the end and for me, It really really did. I actually had understood what I needed to and found it mind blowing. We are only beginning to understand the influence AI has on our life right now and to think he wrote this on a typewriter decades ago is super eerie.
Thank you so much for this review! It helped me to understand why at times I felt lost (English is not my first language), but at the same time I still appreciate the ideas and the world building. Thank you
A lot of that jargon is just software engineering and computer science jargon, or at the very least corresponds to those concepts. As a CS major, the technobabble doesn't seem bad to me. Actually, it makes sense.
@cyotee doge In all likelihood I know more about how computers work than you do. Maybe I'm just not so caught up in the pedantic little details and can see how the general gist of what the quotes are saying might make sense for future tech? Also, Gibson specifically said in an interview that he picked up a lot of the technobabble and cadences from hanging around the early computer scene and listening to programmers talk, so...
Oddly enough I think most of your points are valid but I honestly completely missed them because of being familiar with computers and the internet for a living: You're right in asserting that Gibson was using so much techno-babble it would be confusing to most people. But he got so many fundamental things right about how the world and the internet looks today it creates this weird effect: You immediately recognize a lot of the networking and computer science terminology and make some important connections thinking 'Oh. I know that that is I use that for my job everyday, except this was written in the 80s!? How did he knew!?' And after you start having some of those thoughts well, you kind of fill in the blanks: a lot of what he leaves unexplained and unaddressed we fill in the blanks because we assume he's had this almost prophetic vision and the things that are not explained or have no way of knowing we'll find a way to connect to computer science concepts today even if he never intended to do so and couldn't have even guessed that would be the case almost 40 years later. Which brings up an interesting question of how much do we fill in the blanks when we connect to a specific work, obviously there has to be a lot talent to begin with don't get me wrong, but Gibson shows that you can *always* connect with an audience even if you think addressing a tiny minority of computer nerds would be a pointless endeavor it can have better-than-expected results.
It's a simple case of life imitating art. Gibson described something that sounded plausible, and people spent the next several decades trying to make it actually work.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this book confusing. Even the scenes outside of the net I sometimes struggled with because I spent so much time trying to understand the slang they were using. I think it deserves a re-read on my part to try and get to grips with it, if I can get through A Clockwork Orange I should be able to understand Neuromancer. But I will definitely check out Burning Chrome too
It's so weird how watching this review actually hurt me. Neuromancer means so much to me. That being said I'm not going to defend it but just add a little context to the technobable. Think of it more as a magic system. When Gibson wrote the book he didn't understand computers by his own admission and just made up everything as he went along. I think the average reader today at least has a passing understanding of how computers are SUPPOSED to work and his writing causes dissonance with our knowledge.
Gibson was writing in the 80s and computer technology was less advanced and so the dissonance would possibly increase as computers evolved in a different direction to Gibsons vision
Is similar to read Asimov in a way isn’t it? His technology sometimes feels really out of place but… if I’m honest I ain’t bothered se all because of that, I think that makes it unique
I'll get right on reading burning chrome just as soon as I finish discworld, only about 95% left by my account. Also sleepy cat in background is sleepy.
Of all the book-tubers I've watched, i think your discussions of themes and character are consistantly the best andmost eloquent. And your on-writing and world building videos are something I always look forawrd, i seriously hope you release a second book on it. Have you been hitting the gym or something, man's looking good. (comment editted because I felt weird to only mention the gains)
Reading this book as a non-native english speaker made me feel dumb. I'm so relieved the book is confusing to native speakers as well. That being said, the atmosphere on the first parts of this book was incredible, it felt oppressive somehow, like there was something wrong that was unchangeable. The first chapter really hooked me in, even if I did get very lost eventually.
Interesting that you referenced that card game. That's a pixel-sized sample of what this book inspired. Almost every page has an idea that can be seen in fiction to this day. Real visionary stuff.
I read this and the rest of the trilogy over the course of 2020. I thought it was going to be super out of date and cliche considering all the works inspired and/or ripped off from the book. It holds up very well IMO (well not the three megabytes of hot RAM, but that's how Scifi rolls with real technological development). Also, I've learned to roll with stuff not explained thanks to completing Malazan, lol.
I just finished reading Neuromancer, an excellent head trip of a sci-fi story with some prophetic elements. I found it a little spooky that I happened to read it a little after a week after the FDA approved Neurolink testing in human subjects. It's interesting to think of William Gibson writing about cyberspace virtual reality AI warfare, digital mind/body modification, and space tourism back in 1984 when Super Mario Brothers was a year away and offices ran on mainframes that took up a whole floor of an office building. Reading Neuromancer now, one can feel the influence it's had on entertainment, especially on "The Matrix" , but other movies like "Hackers", "Sneakers", and "The Net". I didn't mind how Gibson doesn't hold the reader's hand when laying out the fictional world the story takes place in. I recently read Cordwainer Smith's "The Rediscovery of Man", which takes the same approach to world building, explaining bizarre elements of his sci-fi world like it's all stuff you're supposed to know about already. The opening chapter of Dan Simmons "Hyperion" also comes to find. I found that taking the effort to decipher theses writers' unique sci-fi dialects made me more engaged with the story once I started to figure out what was going on, and it proved to be a real work out for the imagination brain muscle.
I've read all three books of the 'Sprawl Trilogy' and I'd say Neuromancer is definitely the problem child. Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive shed a lot of the tech language (from what I remember) and the focus on multiple characters helps Gibson with the pacing, in my opinion. The last books end up feeling a lot more like Burning Chrome, from what you describe (haven't read it yet, but I definitely will).
Huh, it's interesting to see people with this take, because it's the complete opposite way for me. I found the prose and atmosphere of Neuromancer to be so incredibly evocative and compelling. Like everything had this hazy almost dreamlike quality to it, and I honestly didn't notice any technobabble at all in the book, so I'm a bit baffled as to people bringing that up as an issue with it. It was written during a time when almost nobody knew what the internet was, much less had a computer in their home, and William Gibson himself admitted to knowing next to nothing about either topic when he wrote it. So any technical descriptions are more akin to a magic system in a fantasy novel than to any real technobabble. Anyway, Count Zero completely lacked that thick and compelling atmosphere of the first book to me, and I haven't continued the trilogy after that. It just felt very much more typical in terms of style and lacked the parts of Neuromancer that I felt made it a truly compelling read. It felt to me that William Gibson kind of phoned it in and likely only wrote sequels because his publisher wanted him to.
Neuromancer isn’t my absolute favorite but I really enjoyed the aftermath of the AI in Count Zero. Honestly, the trilogy as a whole was so important to defining the cyberpunk genre, which is probably my favorite single genre of fiction. P.S. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is glorious.
I've never READ necromancer. But I recently finished it in audiobook version here on yt. Was pretty excellent and helped get me through a monotonous few days at work.
I totally agree with you, Burning Chrome is a lot more accessible, the stories are great. I’ve only read Neuromancer once but Burning Chrome multiple times.
Great book review, but not gonna lie I had to rewatch the video to get any of that because I was distracted by the absolutely adorable kitty in the background x)
Glad I’m not the only one put off by the technobabble. Also I ran into a bit of what I call the Dracula effect where reading stories inspired by the source material made me feel disappointed when reading the source material for the first time.
@Angelspawn the one thing I like about Dracula is it’s essentially the first found footage book, but lots of people did the story better including Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla which was written before Dracula. Regarding Frankenstein, it makes me sad that the most faithful adaptation of the novel was Wishbone on American public broadcasting (not to knock Wishbone, because that show was legit back in the 90s). I would love a true Frankenstein adaptation.
I thought the confusing plot was intentional as one of the major themes is the blurring between truth and illusion. Whether it's holograms, personality cut-outs, or immersive reality simulations, the characters' experiences are constantly challenged, and so is the reader's.
The Technobabble really blew it for me. I mean I kind of enjoyed the book, but it was just a slog to get through and really understand. Not long after, I read Snow Crash which I enjoyed much more as a cyberpunk book.
The funny part for me is, I've played Shadowrun and read Shadowrun stories, SR *borrowed* so much of this technobbable that a good chunk of comes pretty naturaly to me.
There isn't really any real technobabble in it, though. Anything that is there, he basically invented for the novel. William Gibson coined the term, Cyberspace, for the novel, for instance. The technobabble in this is akin to a magic system in a fantasy book, in that it was more or less wholely invented for the book, so it's not like you need any actual understanding of computer science or engineering to understand anything. You have to remember the context of the time when this book was published, during an era where hardly anyone knew what the internet even was, and almost nobody even had a computer in their home.
@@the_senate8050 SR was an attempt to make a Gibson RPG...and then Mike Pondsmith published Cyberpunk just before they were to go to press. The solution? Add dragons! The writers somehow turned the laziest product concept in history into a rather clever bit of social commentary.
I am not a computer programmer, but I know a lot of programmers and have taken a few (very) basic classes. So the language of Neuromancer was not an issue for me. I was having such a great time wrapping my brain around the very visual way that the hacking scenes were described.
Does the book have cops teleporting through walls, cars swimming through the ground, and constant crashes? Because if not then it's not true Cyberpunk...
I physically read 100 pages, along with the audiobook playing simultaneously. Fully annotating as I went along. After 100 pages. I finished it via audiobook only. I felt like annotating something I couldn't understand, was a waste of time. The way I feel about the book is that I fucken love it. But I have no idea why. The parts I don't understand, go over my head, but the parts I do understand I find super entertaining. The world building is the vibe I like, and the personalities of the characters are intriguing. My question is, do I continue with the series, or do I re read it until I understand it, then move on.
Got Burning Chrome from my dad 6 or so years back and I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to Gibson. I love how passionate he clearly is about so many diverse sides of sci-fi, from space travel, to robotics, to the cyberpunk style he helped cement as one of sci-fi's most exciting subgenres. I'm curious if you (or anyone in the comments) has read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the only cyberpunk novel I've read that I loved as much as this rollercoaster of a short story collection. If not, definitely something I'd recommend checking out.
Yeah I think Snow Crash is great (except for one scene with Y.T. and R. which I really hated). It's got some real good worldbuilding and it's a great start into the cyberpunk genre imo.
My copy of Neuromancer is signed by the man himself, at some point in my life I wanted to live Neuromancer, and I was sure it was just a matter of time that we'd all "jack in"!
It's not the inspiration for Netrunner; it's the inspriation for everything. Blade Runner provided the visual framework for cyberpunk, but Gibson created the nuts and bolts that held it together.
Having read Neuromancer first then Burning Chrome, Monalisa, and Difference Engine, I think Neuromancer was the best one. Gibson gets too long winded and repetitive. Cleverness is usually only clever that one time? Bladerunner 2049 is your favorite movie? I can respect that. At least it wasn't Freejack. I found the first Bladerunner to be more aligned with my vision of Cyberpunk. But I am a good bit older than you. Speaking of Freejack, if you want a late 80s, early 90s Cybercheese overload, watch that movie then listen to Billy Idol's Cyberpunk album
I had to read it twice to fully understand what was going on. As others have said, it doesn't explain a whole lot and leaves it up to you to infer or decipher a lot of the details.
I guess I’m a little late to the party, but I actually loved Neuromancer for the exact reasons you found it to be too dense. Neuromancer is excellent at putting you in a similar headspace as the characters. A feverish, dream-like trance, hopped up on designer drugs or experiencing their harsh withdrawal symptoms. Following the machinations of an incomprehensible AI. Existing in strange spaces designed by an eccentric family. Neuromancer could certainly be easier to understand, but it would be a different book entirely. The point is for it to exist right on the edge of comprehension. I’ll admit the first third of it was a slog, but once I “got” it, it was an incredible experience.
When Gibson wrote that book he had never used a computer. He didn’t own or use one with he wrote it. All terms he used were a blend of computer terminology he had heard and of made up.
I liked the writing style of Neuromancer but after 2 attempts I really couldn't get into it. The plot jumps from location to location and I honestly forgot what the characters goals were at times. I much preferred burning chrome too.
Thank you for this review! I like cyberpunk and sci fi in general and I usually enjoy the classics, so I was bummed out when I couldn't get into this story. I didn't like the writing, the characters or the language they used on dialogue, but I did like the way he describes the places. Was good to hear your opinion on this one, it really clears the book up for me
I loved necromancer, one of my favorite non Dune Science Fiction books! I can agree to a degree with some of your criticisms about thr techno babble but it did not seem to effect me, perhaps it's because I grew up in the Cyberpunk heyday burning crome is FANTASTIC as well but I missed the long form story. The Blue Ant series is awesome as well. Altered Carbon was very good as well as a later cyberpunk book. Good video honestly though, I enjoyed it.
I too got lost at the 75 percent mark. I wished I loved it more but I didn’t. Still, there are some ideas here that are honestly some of the best I've ever read. When he gets a scene right you see every detail.
Thank you for actually providing examples of what you were confused about. Too mny people complain but don't provide examples. I had no issue reading it but wondered why others had a had time and realized that words that I knew for granted from reading a lot of computer books as a kid, like"ROM" and "worm", just seemed normal to me. I didn't even catch the "sub-routine" part of the thing you've read as a weird word because it was already familiar to me. It's fascinating how background knowledge affects stuff. It reminds me of reading a lot of British fiction from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that would throw in French phrases as if they are common knowledge and I'd be sitting there hoping that they weren't relevant to the story at the time since I didn't have a French-English dictionary and Google Translate hadn't been invented at the time.
I started Neuromancer about a year ago, the explicit sex scenes honestly ruined it for me. Like it just went so hard for no good reason, maybe I'll try out Burning Chrome though.
I’ve only been exposed to the first one thus far as Im only on page 80 but I felt it was done pretty tastefully, it didn’t take up much space and added to the debauchery theme
Thank you. I thought it might just be me. I’m halfway chapter 2, and the jargon is overwhelming and tiring. And you’re right, Burning Chrome is way more readable.
I'll probably sound like a condescending jerk in this comment, but I honestly don't mean it as an insult when I say I read Neuromancer as teenager in 1989, had zero background in computers (beyond learning some BASIC in jr high on the old Radio Shack TSR-80s) and I understood and loved it, and I can't help but wonder whether a generational difference in attention spans & comprehension is to blame here, or if you and the other commenters are used to media that over-explains everything and aren't practiced in deciphering it.
Sacrilege! Seriously, Burning Chrome was good but Nueromancer is still the King of the Cyberpunk genre. Everything that defines the setting and archetype characters are there and glorious, broke entirely new ground, and even half ass coined the term cyberspace.
yes there is a lot of jargon. i think if you're someone who goes through life having to learn new jargon all the time, you will not have much trouble with neuromancer.
I finally finished Neuromancer and I gotta say, I didn‘t like it. I tried and tried and tried to like it, but my god was it a confusing book. Also, the story itself wasn‘t really interesting, to me there were not real high stakes except Case‘s quest to get those poisonous sacks out of his body and even that never felt like it was really such a big issue. Like I never felt the urgency of it. I could go on and on about why the story didn‘t do it for me. Also, there was no character development for anyone, all the characters felt the same at the end of the book as they were in the beginning.
Tim, if you haven't already, you should check out The Ace of a Scythe by Niel Shusterman. The characters are great, the sci-fi world building is some of the best I've ever read, and the themes and philosophies are amazing. And if you enjoy AI characters, the Thunderhead is wonderful. It is basically a God, and the way it interacts with characters, especially as the books go on, wow.
If you didn't understood what ice braker is, maybe it's because you missed the part when he tell us what I.C.E. is. But, ofcourse, it's hard reading book.
Gibson's writing can be spotty, the next two books in the Sprawl Trilogy were meh, his short stories of which there are not many are solid like Burning Chrome.
Agreed. Some authors are better at short story stuff and Gibson is a great example. Burning chrome is nearly perfect and each story fleshes out this world he’s created. Neuromancer is GREAT at world building but his characters are flat. I wish Neuromancer was shorter and split up into pulpy novellas or something instead of this long, bloated, slow ish novel(for me anyway)
Neuromancer is difficult reading as a sometimes reader of an occasional novel, if your not already a lifelong voracious reader. But if you are a reader, Almost all literature, with few exceptions is mediocrity. Gibson opened a new corridor into a meglomaniac reality that did not yet exist. And it is not perfect. But in later works Gibson seems to have experienced non narcotic drugs. He said marijuana made him uneasy. But in subsequent books his new world narration, " of territories without maps", got even a lot better. New frontier, new langwage, new fleshed out in depth characters, and uncomfortable modernity organizational elements of you knew were already forming , colascing here now. Best wishes. And at that time he was just looking out at the traveling world, as it would go by his car window, but he caught glimpses of the enevitable.
The issue with the techno-bullshit is Gibson is writing the wrong things in the right way. He reels off a load of fictional computer jargon with no explanation from the perspective of a character who knows exactly what all of it means and how it works; it's well-written in the sense it doesn't have Case explaining his own job to himself, so to speak, but it also feels like it disrupts the otherwise defined and gritty real-world events to some degree.
Plus Gibson at that point thought of computers and all related stuff as magic. Dude is turbo retro. He also said, that his tech stuff is a memory metaphor of some kind. That's why there are dead people's constructs, scenery built by ai from character's memory he can't even remember and stuff like that. Not that it makes his tech nonsense plausible and good, but at least we can understand why it is like that. His second trilogy is much more grounded in that sense, because he got a pc and was disappointed that it wasn't magic box, but noisy mess.
That's pretty much computer science. The hardware people at Google have no idea what the fuck the software people are even talking about - and vice versa.
@@jormungandthemidgardserpen1845 By the standards of 1982, modern computers ARE magic boxes. We have voice commands, natural language processing, some fairly passable VR, and a lot of software abstraction tools that negate the need for memorizing every physical location of every @#$! memory cell. Of course, if you can deal with the nuts and volts, there's some pretty substantial access pathways you're not supposed to have..
YES neuromancer is a book that call for active reading and paying attention so you understand some scenes and what is happening in many parts, still there were some descriptions that I couldn't understand. I've stopped like 3 times at chapter 3 and had to start back after quiting However all those technical hacker terms were not much for understanding but more for immersion only and after a while you get the first of entering the matrix and every other thing But all this is rewarded with the exponential increasing pacing of the book and also the scenes with the AI and mainly the scene near the ending when he finds out what neuromancer is (no spoiler) Also: Space Rastafari!
That's what I loved about neurmancer, it felt alone and different. Nothing is really explained and you're just kinda dropped in. Its almost surreal at times especially compared to how we know computers work now. It's a book that requires rereading. Its a lot like dune in those aspects, probably why I like both of them so much.
The "Technobabble" is well explained and entirely self-referential. The secondary material you've described is referencing Neuromancer - all of it - and often explaining things Gibson deliberately refused to describe. When the book was written, it WAS cyberpunk. That's it. If you couldn't figure it out by context, you had to guess. Blade Runner was derived from similar sources, but Gibson avoided the film until he'd finished the book to avoid being derivative. Gibson has spoke frequently of the importance of neither explaining nor documenting everything in a fantastic setting. In his experience, writing a Silmarillion to explain the position of every rock and tree is a detriment to storytelling, and it's correct. As for "the prose doesn't flow as well as it could have," what the hell are you comparing it to? Pablo Neruda? I read the damn thing when I was a kid, devoid of context. Perhaps you should leave the book reviews to people who can read.
Honestly couldn't finish this book. Too bleak, generally too negative for my tastes. I like sci-fi that leaves a glimmer of hope for the future, Neuromancer made me feel grimy.
For me, reading this book was like playing Dark Souls: you're dropped into the middle of things without any explanation, but gradually as the story progresses, you pick up bits and pieces that allow you to put together an idea of what's going on. You never have the complete picture, but the more you dig the more you know. I definitely want to re-read it with the benefit of having finished it once already.
i love books like these, i loved dune and neuromancer for those exact reasons. trying to look for more recommendations of books in a similar vein
Yes voyeuristic
I'm on my 4th time re-reading it. It gets better each time.
I was also very lost when reading this book, doubting that I was understanding what was going on, but I sensed my confusion would pay off in the end and for me, It really really did. I actually had understood what I needed to and found it mind blowing. We are only beginning to understand the influence AI has on our life right now and to think he wrote this on a typewriter decades ago is super eerie.
Thank you so much for this review! It helped me to understand why at times I felt lost (English is not my first language), but at the same time I still appreciate the ideas and the world building. Thank you
A lot of that jargon is just software engineering and computer science jargon, or at the very least corresponds to those concepts. As a CS major, the technobabble doesn't seem bad to me. Actually, it makes sense.
@cyotee doge In all likelihood I know more about how computers work than you do. Maybe I'm just not so caught up in the pedantic little details and can see how the general gist of what the quotes are saying might make sense for future tech? Also, Gibson specifically said in an interview that he picked up a lot of the technobabble and cadences from hanging around the early computer scene and listening to programmers talk, so...
Yeah, I can grok that.
I'm 30% through and literally have 0 clue what's even going on.. idk how to feel
neuronancer: I have no idea what’s going on but this is absolutely thrilling
Oddly enough I think most of your points are valid but I honestly completely missed them because of being familiar with computers and the internet for a living: You're right in asserting that Gibson was using so much techno-babble it would be confusing to most people. But he got so many fundamental things right about how the world and the internet looks today it creates this weird effect: You immediately recognize a lot of the networking and computer science terminology and make some important connections thinking 'Oh. I know that that is I use that for my job everyday, except this was written in the 80s!? How did he knew!?'
And after you start having some of those thoughts well, you kind of fill in the blanks: a lot of what he leaves unexplained and unaddressed we fill in the blanks because we assume he's had this almost prophetic vision and the things that are not explained or have no way of knowing we'll find a way to connect to computer science concepts today even if he never intended to do so and couldn't have even guessed that would be the case almost 40 years later.
Which brings up an interesting question of how much do we fill in the blanks when we connect to a specific work, obviously there has to be a lot talent to begin with don't get me wrong, but Gibson shows that you can *always* connect with an audience even if you think addressing a tiny minority of computer nerds would be a pointless endeavor it can have better-than-expected results.
It's a simple case of life imitating art. Gibson described something that sounded plausible, and people spent the next several decades trying to make it actually work.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this book confusing. Even the scenes outside of the net I sometimes struggled with because I spent so much time trying to understand the slang they were using. I think it deserves a re-read on my part to try and get to grips with it, if I can get through A Clockwork Orange I should be able to understand Neuromancer. But I will definitely check out Burning Chrome too
It's so weird how watching this review actually hurt me. Neuromancer means so much to me. That being said I'm not going to defend it but just add a little context to the technobable.
Think of it more as a magic system. When Gibson wrote the book he didn't understand computers by his own admission and just made up everything as he went along. I think the average reader today at least has a passing understanding of how computers are SUPPOSED to work and his writing causes dissonance with our knowledge.
Gibson was writing in the 80s and computer technology was less advanced and so the dissonance would possibly increase as computers evolved in a different direction to Gibsons vision
Is similar to read Asimov in a way isn’t it? His technology sometimes feels really out of place but… if I’m honest I ain’t bothered se all because of that, I think that makes it unique
@@CleoPinto4317 exactly. I just checked and Neuromancer was published only 6 months after the first Macintosh was released.
@@hunterswepic to me the techno babble was not a deal breaker anyway. It really was kinda easy for me to learn.
I'll get right on reading burning chrome just as soon as I finish discworld, only about 95% left by my account. Also sleepy cat in background is sleepy.
"finishing Discworld" I laugh. Good luck!
~ Tim
@@HelloFutureMe well I'm about a third way through both guards! guards! And Sourcery. So I'd say I'm making good progress.
Of all the book-tubers I've watched, i think your discussions of themes and character are consistantly the best andmost eloquent. And your on-writing and world building videos are something I always look forawrd, i seriously hope you release a second book on it.
Have you been hitting the gym or something, man's looking good.
(comment editted because I felt weird to only mention the gains)
I've actually been really slack these last couple of months, but I do consistently gym!
~ Tim
Reading this book as a non-native english speaker made me feel dumb. I'm so relieved the book is confusing to native speakers as well.
That being said, the atmosphere on the first parts of this book was incredible, it felt oppressive somehow, like there was something wrong that was unchangeable. The first chapter really hooked me in, even if I did get very lost eventually.
Interesting that you referenced that card game. That's a pixel-sized sample of what this book inspired. Almost every page has an idea that can be seen in fiction to this day. Real visionary stuff.
I read this and the rest of the trilogy over the course of 2020. I thought it was going to be super out of date and cliche considering all the works inspired and/or ripped off from the book. It holds up very well IMO (well not the three megabytes of hot RAM, but that's how Scifi rolls with real technological development). Also, I've learned to roll with stuff not explained thanks to completing Malazan, lol.
I just finished reading Neuromancer, an excellent head trip of a sci-fi story with some prophetic elements. I found it a little spooky that I happened to read it a little after a week after the FDA approved Neurolink testing in human subjects. It's interesting to think of William Gibson writing about cyberspace virtual reality AI warfare, digital mind/body modification, and space tourism back in 1984 when Super Mario Brothers was a year away and offices ran on mainframes that took up a whole floor of an office building.
Reading Neuromancer now, one can feel the influence it's had on entertainment, especially on "The Matrix" , but other movies like "Hackers", "Sneakers", and "The Net".
I didn't mind how Gibson doesn't hold the reader's hand when laying out the fictional world the story takes place in. I recently read Cordwainer Smith's "The Rediscovery of Man", which takes the same approach to world building, explaining bizarre elements of his sci-fi world like it's all stuff you're supposed to know about already. The opening chapter of Dan Simmons "Hyperion" also comes to find. I found that taking the effort to decipher theses writers' unique sci-fi dialects made me more engaged with the story once I started to figure out what was going on, and it proved to be a real work out for the imagination brain muscle.
I've read all three books of the 'Sprawl Trilogy' and I'd say Neuromancer is definitely the problem child. Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive shed a lot of the tech language (from what I remember) and the focus on multiple characters helps Gibson with the pacing, in my opinion. The last books end up feeling a lot more like Burning Chrome, from what you describe (haven't read it yet, but I definitely will).
Huh, it's interesting to see people with this take, because it's the complete opposite way for me. I found the prose and atmosphere of Neuromancer to be so incredibly evocative and compelling. Like everything had this hazy almost dreamlike quality to it, and I honestly didn't notice any technobabble at all in the book, so I'm a bit baffled as to people bringing that up as an issue with it. It was written during a time when almost nobody knew what the internet was, much less had a computer in their home, and William Gibson himself admitted to knowing next to nothing about either topic when he wrote it. So any technical descriptions are more akin to a magic system in a fantasy novel than to any real technobabble.
Anyway, Count Zero completely lacked that thick and compelling atmosphere of the first book to me, and I haven't continued the trilogy after that. It just felt very much more typical in terms of style and lacked the parts of Neuromancer that I felt made it a truly compelling read. It felt to me that William Gibson kind of phoned it in and likely only wrote sequels because his publisher wanted him to.
@@itsaUSBline Completely agree, Neuromancer felt like a fuller experience in comparison to the rest of the trilogy.
Neuromancer isn’t my absolute favorite but I really enjoyed the aftermath of the AI in Count Zero. Honestly, the trilogy as a whole was so important to defining the cyberpunk genre, which is probably my favorite single genre of fiction.
P.S. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is glorious.
I've started and stopped in the first chapter of Neuromancer several times. Perhaps I'll take the advice and start with Burning Chrome
I've never READ necromancer. But I recently finished it in audiobook version here on yt. Was pretty excellent and helped get me through a monotonous few days at work.
So cool 😊
The timing was perfect! I was searching for this book last week
Good review!👍👍👍 Burning chrome is going on my tbr📚
I totally agree with you, Burning Chrome is a lot more accessible, the stories are great. I’ve only read Neuromancer once but Burning Chrome multiple times.
Great book review, but not gonna lie I had to rewatch the video to get any of that because I was distracted by the absolutely adorable kitty in the background x)
Glad I’m not the only one put off by the technobabble. Also I ran into a bit of what I call the Dracula effect where reading stories inspired by the source material made me feel disappointed when reading the source material for the first time.
@Angelspawn the one thing I like about Dracula is it’s essentially the first found footage book, but lots of people did the story better including Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla which was written before Dracula. Regarding Frankenstein, it makes me sad that the most faithful adaptation of the novel was Wishbone on American public broadcasting (not to knock Wishbone, because that show was legit back in the 90s). I would love a true Frankenstein adaptation.
I thought the confusing plot was intentional as one of the major themes is the blurring between truth and illusion. Whether it's holograms, personality cut-outs, or immersive reality simulations, the characters' experiences are constantly challenged, and so is the reader's.
Exactly 100% what I felt, thanks for speaking the words 😊
i havent got the first read, that the Kuang-ice-breaker had the form of a shark. that info i missed in my first read of the book.
The Technobabble really blew it for me. I mean I kind of enjoyed the book, but it was just a slog to get through and really understand. Not long after, I read Snow Crash which I enjoyed much more as a cyberpunk book.
The funny part for me is, I've played Shadowrun and read Shadowrun stories, SR *borrowed* so much of this technobbable that a good chunk of comes pretty naturaly to me.
There isn't really any real technobabble in it, though. Anything that is there, he basically invented for the novel. William Gibson coined the term, Cyberspace, for the novel, for instance. The technobabble in this is akin to a magic system in a fantasy book, in that it was more or less wholely invented for the book, so it's not like you need any actual understanding of computer science or engineering to understand anything. You have to remember the context of the time when this book was published, during an era where hardly anyone knew what the internet even was, and almost nobody even had a computer in their home.
@Angelspawn The book was written as a visual novel, and plot exposition makes terrible manga.
@@the_senate8050 SR was an attempt to make a Gibson RPG...and then Mike Pondsmith published Cyberpunk just before they were to go to press.
The solution? Add dragons!
The writers somehow turned the laziest product concept in history into a rather clever bit of social commentary.
I am not a computer programmer, but I know a lot of programmers and have taken a few (very) basic classes. So the language of Neuromancer was not an issue for me. I was having such a great time wrapping my brain around the very visual way that the hacking scenes were described.
Does the book have cops teleporting through walls, cars swimming through the ground, and constant crashes? Because if not then it's not true Cyberpunk...
Lol
Lmao get good pc then
I physically read 100 pages, along with the audiobook playing simultaneously. Fully annotating as I went along. After 100 pages. I finished it via audiobook only. I felt like annotating something I couldn't understand, was a waste of time. The way I feel about the book is that I fucken love it. But I have no idea why. The parts I don't understand, go over my head, but the parts I do understand I find super entertaining. The world building is the vibe I like, and the personalities of the characters are intriguing. My question is, do I continue with the series, or do I re read it until I understand it, then move on.
Got Burning Chrome from my dad 6 or so years back and I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to Gibson. I love how passionate he clearly is about so many diverse sides of sci-fi, from space travel, to robotics, to the cyberpunk style he helped cement as one of sci-fi's most exciting subgenres.
I'm curious if you (or anyone in the comments) has read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the only cyberpunk novel I've read that I loved as much as this rollercoaster of a short story collection. If not, definitely something I'd recommend checking out.
I JUST finished it! I really did like it. Very conceptual, but I really liked YT. Planning to do a review on here at some point.
~ Tim
Awesome! I'll be looking forward to that
Yeah I think Snow Crash is great (except for one scene with Y.T. and R. which I really hated). It's got some real good worldbuilding and it's a great start into the cyberpunk genre imo.
My copy of Neuromancer is signed by the man himself, at some point in my life I wanted to live Neuromancer, and I was sure it was just a matter of time that we'd all "jack in"!
now people all use the net for is to "jack off"
If you've only read Neuromancer, you've read 1/3 of the story. It's a trilogy.
And the later works are more polished craft. I needed more. Best wishes.
@@walterspaceman5592 just finished count zero, it's even more confusing, at least the first half of the book
Sprawl Trilogy not a one time read. It flows better after the the second read.
I love Netrunner, and didn't know this was its inspiration! I'll see if my library has a copy of Burning Chrome and give it a try.
It's not the inspiration for Netrunner; it's the inspriation for everything. Blade Runner provided the visual framework for cyberpunk, but Gibson created the nuts and bolts that held it together.
Having read Neuromancer first then Burning Chrome, Monalisa, and Difference Engine, I think Neuromancer was the best one. Gibson gets too long winded and repetitive. Cleverness is usually only clever that one time?
Bladerunner 2049 is your favorite movie? I can respect that. At least it wasn't Freejack. I found the first Bladerunner to be more aligned with my vision of Cyberpunk. But I am a good bit older than you.
Speaking of Freejack, if you want a late 80s, early 90s Cybercheese overload, watch that movie then listen to Billy Idol's Cyberpunk album
I had to read it twice to fully understand what was going on. As others have said, it doesn't explain a whole lot and leaves it up to you to infer or decipher a lot of the details.
I guess I’m a little late to the party, but I actually loved Neuromancer for the exact reasons you found it to be too dense.
Neuromancer is excellent at putting you in a similar headspace as the characters. A feverish, dream-like trance, hopped up on designer drugs or experiencing their harsh withdrawal symptoms. Following the machinations of an incomprehensible AI. Existing in strange spaces designed by an eccentric family.
Neuromancer could certainly be easier to understand, but it would be a different book entirely. The point is for it to exist right on the edge of comprehension. I’ll admit the first third of it was a slog, but once I “got” it, it was an incredible experience.
When Gibson wrote that book he had never used a computer. He didn’t own or use one with he wrote it. All terms he used were a blend of computer terminology he had heard and of made up.
This video convinced me to buy the audiobook. I got a long drive and I'm hoping this makes my trip more enjoyable.
I liked the writing style of Neuromancer but after 2 attempts I really couldn't get into it. The plot jumps from location to location and I honestly forgot what the characters goals were at times. I much preferred burning chrome too.
Simply love all kinds of videos of yours :)
I read it in Thailand on holiday, It was a pretty complicated book, but awesome for sure.. I just started reading The Black Company books, so good
I read it once. Gonna have to read it again. And probably again.
Love how engaging this is! Like high school English, but so much more exciting!
TH-cam needs to stop changing the app because it keeps breaking things. Now the video overlay won't play after pausing it the video.
Thank you for this review! I like cyberpunk and sci fi in general and I usually enjoy the classics, so I was bummed out when I couldn't get into this story. I didn't like the writing, the characters or the language they used on dialogue, but I did like the way he describes the places. Was good to hear your opinion on this one, it really clears the book up for me
I literally started reading neuromancer 2 days ago :(
I loved necromancer, one of my favorite non Dune Science Fiction books! I can agree to a degree with some of your criticisms about thr techno babble but it did not seem to effect me, perhaps it's because I grew up in the Cyberpunk heyday burning crome is FANTASTIC as well but I missed the long form story. The Blue Ant series is awesome as well. Altered Carbon was very good as well as a later cyberpunk book. Good video honestly though, I enjoyed it.
Is that an azula painting? Love it
My only gripe is that i wish there was an edition with decent cover art.
I too got lost at the 75 percent mark. I wished I loved it more but I didn’t. Still, there are some ideas here that are honestly some of the best I've ever read. When he gets a scene right you see every detail.
Thank you for actually providing examples of what you were confused about. Too mny people complain but don't provide examples. I had no issue reading it but wondered why others had a had time and realized that words that I knew for granted from reading a lot of computer books as a kid, like"ROM" and "worm", just seemed normal to me. I didn't even catch the "sub-routine" part of the thing you've read as a weird word because it was already familiar to me. It's fascinating how background knowledge affects stuff. It reminds me of reading a lot of British fiction from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that would throw in French phrases as if they are common knowledge and I'd be sitting there hoping that they weren't relevant to the story at the time since I didn't have a French-English dictionary and Google Translate hadn't been invented at the time.
My favorite book
My favorite book too. :)
I love the technobabble, its my favorire part of gibson's writing for me. Strong imagery
You should read Neuromancer, Burning Chrome - and his Bridge Trilogy.
I started Neuromancer about a year ago, the explicit sex scenes honestly ruined it for me. Like it just went so hard for no good reason, maybe I'll try out Burning Chrome though.
I’ve only been exposed to the first one thus far as Im only on page 80 but I felt it was done pretty tastefully, it didn’t take up much space and added to the debauchery theme
This is a legitimate criticism. They're kinda dumb.
It’s not a hard book to follow if you abandon the need for complete understanding. Some things are better understood in the haze.
I'm more distracted by his cat 😂
I'll read Burning Chrome as my first February book now, Thanks jaja
Keep doing book reviews please 😬
9:00 Bitter? Better? ...huh?
I think he has a new Zealand or Australian accent
Thank you for the review, I really love Blade Runner and the cyberpunk genre so I was curious about this book.
You summarize excellently why the book, for me, was sometimes hard to follow. Now I feel less alone and less stupid regarding it :).
Thank you. I thought it might just be me. I’m halfway chapter 2, and the jargon is overwhelming and tiring. And you’re right, Burning Chrome is way more readable.
Idoru was the Vtuber novel before Vtubers!
Also much more fun than Neuromancer, but still not quite as deep!
Hey can you do a review on on Name of the wind?
Reading the book is for me like breaking the ice of a KI
I'll probably sound like a condescending jerk in this comment, but I honestly don't mean it as an insult when I say I read Neuromancer as teenager in 1989, had zero background in computers (beyond learning some BASIC in jr high on the old Radio Shack TSR-80s) and I understood and loved it, and I can't help but wonder whether a generational difference in attention spans & comprehension is to blame here, or if you and the other commenters are used to media that over-explains everything and aren't practiced in deciphering it.
Hey Tim, check out Sufficiently Advanced Magic. It is an amazing book and the universe the book is set in is amazing! Andrew Rowe is an amazing author
great book review and also great cat :3
Awesome review.
I read this book last year too! I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to as well. Described it amazingly. I’m glad Burning Chrome is better!
Sacrilege!
Seriously, Burning Chrome was good but Nueromancer is still the King of the Cyberpunk genre. Everything that defines the setting and archetype characters are there and glorious, broke entirely new ground, and even half ass coined the term cyberspace.
yes there is a lot of jargon. i think if you're someone who goes through life having to learn new jargon all the time, you will not have much trouble with neuromancer.
Why Not read both
I'm watching the cat. The cat gets it.
I finally finished Neuromancer and I gotta say, I didn‘t like it. I tried and tried and tried to like it, but my god was it a confusing book.
Also, the story itself wasn‘t really interesting, to me there were not real high stakes except Case‘s quest to get those poisonous sacks out of his body and even that never felt like it was really such a big issue. Like I never felt the urgency of it. I could go on and on about why the story didn‘t do it for me.
Also, there was no character development for anyone, all the characters felt the same at the end of the book as they were in the beginning.
Tim, if you haven't already, you should check out The Ace of a Scythe by Niel Shusterman. The characters are great, the sci-fi world building is some of the best I've ever read, and the themes and philosophies are amazing. And if you enjoy AI characters, the Thunderhead is wonderful. It is basically a God, and the way it interacts with characters, especially as the books go on, wow.
It's just Logan's Run with extra plot exposition.
Neuromancer is such a weird book. I love and hate it at the same time.
If you want a weird, semi-cyberpunk series, try Jack L. Chalker's "The Wonderland Gambit". It's good, but it's weird. Your millage may vary.
I don’t think it’s like you should read one over the other just read both burning chrome first then the sprawl trilogy
These days there are millions of cyberpunks dribbling soda pop in front of sub-moronic game consuls like leftovers from a lemming laboratory.
If you didn't understood what ice braker is, maybe it's because you missed the part when he tell us what I.C.E. is.
But, ofcourse, it's hard reading book.
Gibson's writing can be spotty, the next two books in the Sprawl Trilogy were meh, his short stories of which there are not many are solid like Burning Chrome.
Agreed. Some authors are better at short story stuff and Gibson is a great example. Burning chrome is nearly perfect and each story fleshes out this world he’s created. Neuromancer is GREAT at world building but his characters are flat. I wish Neuromancer was shorter and split up into pulpy novellas or something instead of this long, bloated, slow ish novel(for me anyway)
It's short. Compared to the cryptonomicon, it is a short story.
Neuromancer is difficult reading as a sometimes reader of an occasional novel, if your not already a lifelong voracious reader. But if you are a reader, Almost all literature, with few exceptions is mediocrity. Gibson opened a new corridor into a meglomaniac reality that did not yet exist. And it is not perfect. But in later works Gibson seems to have experienced non narcotic drugs. He said marijuana made him uneasy. But in subsequent books his new world narration, " of territories without maps", got even a lot better. New frontier, new langwage, new fleshed out in depth characters, and uncomfortable modernity organizational elements of you knew were already forming , colascing here now. Best wishes. And at that time he was just looking out at the traveling world, as it would go by his car window, but he caught glimpses of the enevitable.
I think neuromancer is a flawed masterpiece. Definitely was very hard to read at first but im on my second go through and its easier to understand
He techno babble almost like Moorcock fantasy babble.. is it a thing for its time?
The issue with the techno-bullshit is Gibson is writing the wrong things in the right way. He reels off a load of fictional computer jargon with no explanation from the perspective of a character who knows exactly what all of it means and how it works; it's well-written in the sense it doesn't have Case explaining his own job to himself, so to speak, but it also feels like it disrupts the otherwise defined and gritty real-world events to some degree.
Plus Gibson at that point thought of computers and all related stuff as magic. Dude is turbo retro.
He also said, that his tech stuff is a memory metaphor of some kind. That's why there are dead people's constructs, scenery built by ai from character's memory he can't even remember and stuff like that.
Not that it makes his tech nonsense plausible and good, but at least we can understand why it is like that.
His second trilogy is much more grounded in that sense, because he got a pc and was disappointed that it wasn't magic box, but noisy mess.
That's pretty much computer science. The hardware people at Google have no idea what the fuck the software people are even talking about - and vice versa.
@@jormungandthemidgardserpen1845 By the standards of 1982, modern computers ARE magic boxes. We have voice commands, natural language processing, some fairly passable VR, and a lot of software abstraction tools that negate the need for memorizing every physical location of every @#$! memory cell.
Of course, if you can deal with the nuts and volts, there's some pretty substantial access pathways you're not supposed to have..
It's like you didn't think of what you were going to talk about beforehand. Add cuts if you can't have a solid flow the whole video. Stopped at 3min.
I didn't even make it that long.
Please fight.
Why can I imagine this being the opening line in a fantasy novel?
YES neuromancer is a book that call for active reading and paying attention so you understand some scenes and what is happening in many parts, still there were some descriptions that I couldn't understand. I've stopped like 3 times at chapter 3 and had to start back after quiting
However all those technical hacker terms were not much for understanding but more for immersion only and after a while you get the first of entering the matrix and every other thing
But all this is rewarded with the exponential increasing pacing of the book and also the scenes with the AI and mainly the scene near the ending when he finds out what neuromancer is (no spoiler)
Also: Space Rastafari!
That's what I loved about neurmancer, it felt alone and different. Nothing is really explained and you're just kinda dropped in. Its almost surreal at times especially compared to how we know computers work now. It's a book that requires rereading. Its a lot like dune in those aspects, probably why I like both of them so much.
The "Technobabble" is well explained and entirely self-referential. The secondary material you've described is referencing Neuromancer - all of it - and often explaining things Gibson deliberately refused to describe.
When the book was written, it WAS cyberpunk. That's it. If you couldn't figure it out by context, you had to guess. Blade Runner was derived from similar sources, but Gibson avoided the film until he'd finished the book to avoid being derivative.
Gibson has spoke frequently of the importance of neither explaining nor documenting everything in a fantastic setting. In his experience, writing a Silmarillion to explain the position of every rock and tree is a detriment to storytelling, and it's correct.
As for "the prose doesn't flow as well as it could have," what the hell are you comparing it to? Pablo Neruda?
I read the damn thing when I was a kid, devoid of context. Perhaps you should leave the book reviews to people who can read.
So, all I got from this video is you saying, "Me read book. Words used me not know. Me feel bad."
i actually like the technobabble , it helped me suspend disbelief
The book is better than the movie
I’ve read the first 6 stories of burning chrome and most is trash with stories that never feel resolved and give you no reason to care.
Honestly couldn't finish this book. Too bleak, generally too negative for my tastes. I like sci-fi that leaves a glimmer of hope for the future, Neuromancer made me feel grimy.
You're complaining that cyberpunk is bleak?
Might as well make the same criticism of Tolstoy. It's the genre.
Great Sci Fi, not so great storytelling to be honest