Neuromancing the Stone

"There is no way to overstate how radical Neuromancer was when it first appeared." - Time Magazine, 2005

Neuromancer has gotten inside my head, and I'm only halfway through it. It's really good, but crazy-difficult going sometimes, being completely drenched in the jargon and paraphernalia of another, alien age built upon our own.
There are ideas in there...ideas that pop up from seemingly nowhere and wrestle with my imagination for hours afterwards.

It is a strange future age of Cyberspace (the author coined that very term, in his book Burning Chrome), virtual reality, and artificial intelligences who have brokered limited citizenship rights. Super-advanced electronics permeate everything and everywhere. This is all wound up in a dystopian future where bodies are "just meat", and nobody really wants to live in the physical world any more if they can afford not to. No accident the main character is named Case, that's really all his body represents, like the plastic box your computer is housed in. People who spend time in the real world modify their bodies in all kinds of fantastic and horrifying ways, to keep pace with style trends that sweep across the world in days and evaporate just as quickly.

How would you like green reflective eyes like a cat? No problem. Pink skin? Easy. Terminals in your skull that allow you to plug in memories and knowledge from other people? Yep. How about a couple of high-performance extra body parts grafted on? For sure. Want to live for 300 years? Anything you could want or think of to do to yourself, both in the real world and in the many virtual ones, is available.

Except privacy. Everything is bugged, wired, and on video. It takes a very rich person and lots of jamming gear to afford even a temporary slice of privacy.

There are so many crazy new concepts in this book that it's becoming difficult to wrap my head around them all. This is the original "Cyberpunk" novel. It introduced the world to the concept of virtual landscapes and in a real way it gave intellectual permission to, and even braced us for, the World Wide Web. So crazy were these ideas in 1984 that most people didn't even know what to make of them. Even in 2010, after many of these concepts have bled into our culture, this book is so convoluted and alien I can see I'm going to have to read it more than once to grasp it.

One reason I find this book so compelling is that the ideas presented are all integrated so well into this world and its people that none of it really seems all that surprising. The jargon seems natural, not faked or made-up. People respond to the world just like you'd think they would, mostly with a fatalism that reflects their harsh reality, along with a huge dose of escapism of every kind imaginable.

Eventually, all rules get broken, and if you apply that principle to genetic engineering and the rainbow spectrum of the world's social constructs, I think you can get a slim glimpse of the future here, disquieting though it may be.

This William Gibson guy is a genius, I am convinced of that. The fact that his book won every award a sci-fi book can win and sits near the very top of a genre that is filled with the works of genius, that's just icing. He's up in the rarefied orbit of Clarke and Asimov, Dick and Heinlein for my money, he's the real deal. Debut novel, wow.

The director who is daring to make this into a movie has Gibson's personal blessing, but I fear he won't be able to do it justice. The book is largely considered unfilmable which is why it's never been made into a movie in 26 years. Oh, pieces of it have, The Matrix for instance is under heavy influence, and you can see the stamp of this book retroactively in many other sci-fi films of the last 20 years.


But the whole disturbing, messy and gritty megascope of the piece...with its vertigo-inducing flips between worlds real and virtual, consciousness-sharing and intelligent mechanical steampunk constructs, Razorgirls and hackers with names like "The Dixie Flatiline", all set in a massive "Sprawl" of neon and decaying buildings under a sky the color of "a television tuned to a dead channel"...I just don't see how anyone could do this justice.

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." - William Gibson, Neuromancer