Back before the internet tied the world together with lolcats, anonymous hate, and free pornography, science-fiction authors enjoyed to speculate on the coolness the future would hold once man was given the ability to “hack” into cyberspace using avatars directed from remote consoles. Little did they know how lame the reality would be when compared to their jive-talkin’, street-wise, cyber-addict, punk, super-stylized, 1337 hackers that they dreamed up in the 1980’s and sooner.

William Gibson is one of the original “WTF?” literary scholars in my opinion. Sometimes called the Grandfather of the Cyber-Punk genre, he was undoubtedly under-appreciated in his time, mostly due to how wild and creative his vision of a future filled with sim-stims, derms, organ transplants, and human-computer interfacing was…. which probably floored any comprehensional attempt by people in a pre-pc era. I mean the guy had characters that were genetically-bred clones, holographic projections, suave super hackers, brainwashed army generals, talking fragments of sophisticated AI personalities, and surrealistically sexy assassin chicks with retractable razor claws and permanent mirrored sunglasses built into her eyeballs!

All before this stuff became “common-place” in the medium of video games and movies, Gibson helped pioneer the gritty, urban, dystopian view of the future that reads both bleak and seductive at the same time. Whorehouses exist where women sell themselves, renting out their bodies to run “sexual programs” of which they don’t remember. Age has been negated in that surgeries of all manner can replace limbs as easily as changing the tire on a car. Body modifications can be implanted to increase agility and reflexes, just as datachips and other digital access ports can be tailored to meet the needs of the budding “console cowboys” who reign in the market with their repertoire of accessing ICED data mainframes and evading local law enforcement.

Both reading ABOUT and reflecting AFTER reading this book makes it sound incredible, slick, inventive, and just all-round “cool beans”. And it truly is to some degree. However, launching into Neuromancer (the first of a trilogy) without having an idea of what the writing style looks like or having been pre-given a loose outline of the story that the book flounders to illustrate, the reader may find themselves lost and increasingly frustrated that a bad-ass story lies just beyond the grasp of comprehension.

See, Gibson’s method of conveying his complex and foreign tale of covertly illegal program acquisition and AI liberation, complete with a medicine cabinet of made-up drugs and softwares and organizations, is to do what can only be described as “stream of consciousness” AKA “no editing”. The words splash out of his brain and onto the page freely, easily, without a single damn given as to whether the point is well-illustrated or not. Gibson is a stark contrast to writers like Neal Stephenson, whom tends to OVER-explain his skewed (and sometimes humorous) version of a cyber-punk world gone haywire. There is no humor in Neuromancer and there is no explanation. What is presented is a masterfully moody pretense with a deficit of basic facts to grasp onto. You “feel” the gist of what is going on due to unconventional word choice even if your brain can’t piece it all together.

-And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phospenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.-

I’m only half-sure that Gibson was on LSD through half the writing of this book. “Half-sure” because the amount needed to send him on a Dr. Seus-ian rant about a figurative acid dream in this strangely deep and deeply strange world of his own creation would require more drugs than the characters consume throughout the story and would more likely result in the author wielding a broom handle to beat back a typewriter that had suddenly sprouted legs and a vicious row of shark’s teeth. This style of writing certainly sounds streamlined, but with the exception of a brilliantly “noire” introduction and select “islands” of artistic clarity throughout the work, Neuromancer reads like a Maya Angelou recitation of a poem she dedicated to Keaunu Reeve’s role in The Matrix.

Most of the time i didn’t understand if the noun in question was a person, corporation, program sub-routine, or even a former person whose emotions were supplanted into a program sub-routine (blending the preconceptions of the stated categories). Names like 3Jane Marie-France, Lonny Zone, Armitage, Case, L5, Tessier-Ashpool, Wintermute, Ono-Sendai, Marcus Garvey, Flatline, Maelcum, Straylight, Kolodny, Desiderata, and Kuang Grade Mark Eleven left me scrambling to remember who (or what) was being described in their absence from the scene where addicts and hackers exchanged rapid-fire techno-quips back and forth Dragnet-style. Additionally, since Gibson already has an intimacy with his characters he takes the connection to alternative nomenclature for granted by frequently switching between the stated names and either their nicknames, slang replacement of their proper names (maybe an insult), or an unexplained substitution which may describe their fictional occupation. I actually do like his naming conventions since they are non-traditional and show hints of Asian and techno influence (which makes perfect contextual sense), but i just threw up my hands at some point and wouldn’t let this couple hundred pages beat me because I couldn’t remember who was called what and what was whichever got hacked by whom.

Throw in some crazy Jamaican colloquialisms, which are vaguely easier to piece together than the futuristic street jargon, and you’ve got a lingual mess on your hands. In short, the pseudo-language is more of an obstacle and more distracting than the names could ever be:

-“They’re def triff, huh?” Cath asked, seeing him eye the transparencies. “Mine. Shot ’em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled, so natural. And it was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?”-

I grabbed this quote at random from the book! Even in context, I have no idea what this passage says or the importance it has to the overall story, making the implementation of the technology and street-talk much harder to figure out than the actual settings and intentions of that technology.

"She's cooler than Trinity", is what the author is trying to convey.

This isn’t to say that the tech and concepts are easy to wrap your head around. Since the story-telling is so rough, it’s genuinely hard to discern what is a complex plot point that is too smart for the reader or what is simply lost in translation, especially on a first read-through. Neuromancer is filled with sick alien gadgets, lucid drug and dreamstates, a full-contact and visceral version of the internet, and a set of devices that allows a character to ride piggyback while simultaneously experiencing life through the eyes of another human host. These altered views occur SIMULTANEOUSLY at times, as the main character functions in reality, surfs a virtual reality to peek in on a hacking program, and then “jacks in” to a female operative’s body whom is in the midst of an infiltration. If you throw in a character that can create holograms with his mind, you never have a good grip on reality, much less an understanding of which way is up and what is going down. Part of this discombobulation is intended, of course, but it simply feels like the subject material eluded Gibson on the whole. I frequently had unclear mental visions of the depicted scenes, characters flitting about between “frames” much how they use camera tricks on ghosts in horror movies. The only thing you can do is turn another page and go with the flow. It’s just a shame that everything isn’t as engaging as it could potentially be.

When I was assaulted with the diverse and creative nouns presented in the oppressively deep Dune series, I merely flipped to the back and viewed the glossary Frank Herbert had kindly included as a reference material. Not the case with this book. Instead, you are left to slog through the disjuncted words and phrases on your own, gleaning what you can, holding tight to this bucking bull until you get to the conclusion where everything is explained (more or less). Because there is a good story at its heart, Neuromancer is certainly a unique and fantastic romp through the edgy vision of this incredibly realized world, but it is still a garbled fast-talking mess that tries to make you put it down prematurely. To get the most out of the experience, I highly recommend reading the wikipedia synopsis before diving in, otherwise you may feel the longing as I do, having received tidbits of clarity in a morasse of confusion.

I had actually read the sequel, Count Zero, about a decade ago and was similarly lost, but for whatever reason the lure of Gibson’s world is strong. I don’t WANT to pick up another title of his, but I just FEEL that I need to. I simply want to see his subject material executed properly so I’ll continue to keep my fingers crossed….