Despite a wayward youth given to such dissolutions as listening to industrial music, using lots of recreational drugs, and playing Cyberpunk 2020, I never actually read William Gibson's seminal novel. Just yesterday I finished reading it. So what of it?
The conventional wisdom about Neuromancer is that, however poorly its vision of the future has aged, it was visionary for its time. So much so, it actually influenced the subsequent development of the technologies it depicted and the way we think about them. It also gave us a number of neologisms, including the old chestnut (and, yes, it's been around long enough to become an old chestnut) cyberspace.
The conventional wisdom has it correct, but Neuromancer shows just how much our present shapes our vision of the future. Gibson was writing in an industrial age, trying to imagine an information age. Neuromancer's landscapes are littered with the artifacts and detrius of an industrial age: video arcades, pay phones, tank wars. Everything is covered in rust, but no blade of grass dares find purchase in the cracked asphalt.
Neuromancer also shows that a science fiction novel can be critically and financially successful even if it has serious literary flaws. For example, Case, the POV character, is superfluous to the story. He's there as an involved observer to draw out details of the setting, but his actions have no real plot consequences.
I was also struck by Neuromancer's agnosticism about technology. Some science fictions lauds it. Most science fiction consists of cautionary tales about it. But Neuromancer envisions a world where technology penetrates the fabric of daily life, but does very little to change human nature, whether in our motives or actions. Case, Molly, and the rest act out of greed, revenge, curiosity, and so forth in familiar ways. For better or worse, technology won't change who we are, but just let us be ourselves all the more so.
Dear PM Clever
ReplyDeleteI have usually dismissed novels like Neuromancer for exactly the reasons you mention - their literary flaws, but I warm to your take on it.
I think there are strong parallels between this view of technology, and religion in general - in that both could be an integral part of our lives but impact little on our basic instincts for greed, revenge and so on. It's a bleak but realistic comment on humanity's intrinsic inability to change, regardless of the external paradigms of 'best practice' imposed on it. I like it.
Science fiction and fantasy (or speculative fiction, for the slightly snobbier) are more about ideas and vision than artistic excellence. So even an absolutely plodding writer (say, oh, JRR Tolkein, who couldn't narrate his way out of a wet paper sack) can become enormously successful, both critically and commercially, if their writing is sufficiently visionary and imaginative to resonate with an audience. I suspect that, in fact, clever writing actually diminishes the allure of an imaginary world. A not insignificant portion of the readership is drawn into a fantastic world because they can more readily imagine themselves writing an equally good, if not better, story set in that world.
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