I don’t find myself having much difficulty with Neuromancer. Cyberpunk is a familiar landscape after so many years of playing the (now ancient) game Deus Ex. That game traverses a lot of the same ground that Neuromancer covers: a world rotting underneath megacorporations with a population augmented by implants. So, I suppose I didn’t have much difficulty in picking up on the actual story or even any bit of difficulty locking in on the major themes.
However, that last sentence allows me to embarrass myself if I haven’t actually picking up on the themes correctly.
The entire foundation of Neuromancer is one of isolation. Case is isolated from a fundamental human experience. It’s easy to scoff at his melodramatic weeping over the disconnect from a more advanced internet, but I wonder how valid that scoffing is. I can think of the times when weather has knocked out the power for several days. Being without electricity — the internet, television, news, entertainment, whatever — makes me want to kill myself. And I still have the ability to do other things. Case doesn’t. The entire world built within Neuromancer is locked away from him simply because he can’t connect to the internet. His frustration is understandable.
And it goes beyond an isolation from activity or even fitting into the world. He must feel so separate from humanity at large solely because he can’t engage in something so routine. I wonder what Gibson was getting at with these themes of isolation. Is it a cautionary tale? As we become more and more connected, will those who cannot “connect” become more and more isolated from humanity? And is he necessarily saying this is a negative thing?
I recall the idea of the human singularity. That eventually all human minds will become interconnected through some sort of internet or computer system and, ultimately, individuality will start to wane. This seems horrifying to me. But so does absolute isolation from the human consciousness.
But, getting back to the story. One of the things absent from Neuromancer that I think is better represented in other works that fall under the cyberpunk genre is the question of humanity. Implants, augmentations, and so on seem to be accepted in Neuromancer. Would that really be the case? The world even, to some extent, accepts the existence of artificial intelligence.
In other cyberpunk works, the pro-augmentation side is shown to clash with a more conservative group that upholds the virtue of maintaining one’s unaltered humanity. Why is this not the case in Neuromancer? People seemed apprehensive about the internet. People still do, in fact. I wonder where these people are in Gibson’s novel. Is the euphoric dream of the matrix so compelling that it calls, like a siren, to people, forcing them to be abandon their humanity? Personally, I feel that given a choice between losing technology, I might take the avenue of abandoning my humanity.
More over, at what point does the nature of humanity shift? When do the people who refuse to accept the matrix change from being “people who refuse to abandon humanity” to “people who refuse to accept humanity”? I would say when a majority shifts over to whichever side, but, at the same time, I feel like there might be more to the story then that.
I suppose, ultimately, I would have liked to see Gibson explore the debate of the matrix, of augmentation, and so on in a more detailed manner. Obviously, he does explore the blurring line of humanity and technology. I would have just liked to see other aspects of it. I don’t know if that counts as a difficulty or not though.
PS: Gibson is sort of awful at writing dialogue. Everyone talks like the same person. Insight into human singularity or bad dialogue? The world may never know. I absolutely hate how, were I to cover the speech tags, I would be unable to distinguish Molly from Linda from Case from Julius. The only character with a semi-distinct voice is Ratz, and that’s just because of his constant “artiste”.
Forgive me if you love his dialogue. I cannot stand it. My taste is awful, probably.
