Jul. 21st, 2025 04:46 pm
Neuromancer by William Gibson
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lightreadsNeuromancer
3/5. Do I need to say what this is? Look at me reading this, only twenty mumble years after multiple boys informed me, explicitly or implicitly, that my opinions on all literature known to man were irrelevant unless and until I read this book (and liked it, one presumes). You’ll note that this directly resulted in me not reading this for multiple decades.
I do not like it very much, for the record. It is what it is, and it suffers hugely from me having previously read many of the books that it engendered, such that I finally get back to this and find it reads as derivative rather than what it is. It also suffers from the racism, I should mention. Oh, and the thing where the male protagonist is a total loser and yet we have to spend all this time with him while a much more interesting woman does stuff that actually makes the story go. At least Gibson was apparently aware of that; he just didn’t do anything about it (in this book, anyway – I have the impression she gets better billing later).
What no one told me, however, is that Gibson can really write. I may not be interested in a lot of the stuff he’s interested in, he may have been baked out of his mind while writing most of this, I may find this tired and silly, but god damn if I didn’t reread certain passages of this multiple times just to figure out how he just did that. If I’d known he was writing like that, I would have read him twenty years ago. Though then again, I probably wouldn’t have known how to read a writer like that twenty years ago, so okay.
Also, I’ll say this for him, that is still a banger of a title.
Content notes: Fridging. Racist stereotypes in multiple directions.
3/5. Do I need to say what this is? Look at me reading this, only twenty mumble years after multiple boys informed me, explicitly or implicitly, that my opinions on all literature known to man were irrelevant unless and until I read this book (and liked it, one presumes). You’ll note that this directly resulted in me not reading this for multiple decades.
I do not like it very much, for the record. It is what it is, and it suffers hugely from me having previously read many of the books that it engendered, such that I finally get back to this and find it reads as derivative rather than what it is. It also suffers from the racism, I should mention. Oh, and the thing where the male protagonist is a total loser and yet we have to spend all this time with him while a much more interesting woman does stuff that actually makes the story go. At least Gibson was apparently aware of that; he just didn’t do anything about it (in this book, anyway – I have the impression she gets better billing later).
What no one told me, however, is that Gibson can really write. I may not be interested in a lot of the stuff he’s interested in, he may have been baked out of his mind while writing most of this, I may find this tired and silly, but god damn if I didn’t reread certain passages of this multiple times just to figure out how he just did that. If I’d known he was writing like that, I would have read him twenty years ago. Though then again, I probably wouldn’t have known how to read a writer like that twenty years ago, so okay.
Also, I’ll say this for him, that is still a banger of a title.
Content notes: Fridging. Racist stereotypes in multiple directions.
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