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Within the last 24 hours I finished three books: Drew Hayden Taylor’s Me Funny, Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, and Neuromancer by William Gibson. All were enjoyable, none of them perfect.

Neuromancer is an interesting book both for its strengths and weaknesses. I started the book two weeks ago and mentioned how the opening chapters really blew me away. Then, if you read the comments, you’ll see that I’m not alone in finding that the initial euphoria wore off pretty quickly. This is one case where the aggressive world-building that happens up front is so stylishly done it really did hook me and didn’t let go. Until it did.

The remainder of the book suffers from being too driven by the plot, which is not usually a criticism of mine. (In fact, I normally kvetch about just the opposite.) But Neuromancer keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, and I felt that Gibson needed to take his foot off the pedal a little and let the story breathe and maybe be about something more than just technoporn. It just so happens that one of the essays for my sci-fi class says approximately the same thing, only smarter. In Tom Moylan’s The Critical Dystopia he writes:

In my own study of Gibson’s [Sprawl] trilogy, I argue that this dynamic series simultaneously appropriated and rejected the feminist utopias of the 1960s and compromised its own negative portrayal of contemporary society by containing that radical vision within the limits of a caper plot that privileges the hustling ability of its loner male heroes and ends up going nowhere beyond the world found on the first page of Neuromancer. As I saw it, Gibson astutely capture the mise-en-scene of the capitalist culture, but he minimized the risk of his iconic critique with the “safety net” of a narrative that collapsed into the logic of the very system he set out to expose.

Agreed, Tom! Still, that doesn’t diminish the sheer visionary power of Neuromancer, which was published in 1984 when ColecoVision was hot technology.

What next on the audiobook queue? I’m having a hard time procuring the audiobooks I want from the library which means I might have to dip into my archive. Ubik? A Scanner Darkly? Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

Current Mood: Zoning Out |
Currently Listening To – Wilco – “Summerteeth”