After hearing and reading a bit about William Gibson and his influence on the science fiction genre, I was pretty excited to begin reading Neuromancer. I for one wasn’t expecting what was prepared for me. Granted, when seeing the prompt, “Why is Neuromancer difficult?” I thought, “Well at least it is assumed that the novel is difficult!”
To be frank, the first few chapters of the novel are extremely disorienting. The language presented in even the first chapter proves extremely hard to follow, as it drips with multiple scientific terms, leaving me scrambling for a dictionary and Googling such terms such as “black clinics” (pg. 4), “quartz-halogen,” (pg. 6), “mycotoxin,” (pg. 6) and “mutagen” (pg. 11), etc. At one point I put myself in the shoes of one reading this when it was first published in 1984, and imagined the sort of further confusion I would have felt upon coming across now-well-known terms such as “cyberspace” and “matrix.” Furthermore, the fact that the novel is set in Japan provides another web to fight through; perhaps if Gibson had taken to time to establish this setting in detail it would have been a little more clear off the bat. But looking at the first paragraph, we see that this kind of language is assumed by Gibson:
“‘It’s not like I’m using,’ Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. ‘It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.’ It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.” (pg. 3)
In a sense, Gibson is throwing us into the deep end of a pool and saying, ‘Swim!’ His lack of setting establishment as well as character development in the first chapters of the novel make it to be a wrestle for understanding what exactly is going on. Characters such as Molly, Armitage, and even Case himself are thrown in rather suddenly. Thinking about science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement,” I wondered how this novel began to fit the model, when I realized that it didn’t at all. I think in this brash kind of introduction to the novel where Gibson appears to be assuming us to know many of these terms without explanation, he departs from the traditional form of science fiction to a new, modern genre known as “Cyberpunk.” Thus instead of forming a reality from one we already know to be real, he puts us in a disorienting spot and moves from there. Furthermore the characters he creates not only are outcasts in the novel itself, but in one way are outcasts to us as well, giving the novel its own life that we are attempting to view from an outsider perspective. This is one big reason why I think Neuromancer is so difficult: style and tone, rather than plot and characterization, are what (at least so far) have come forward as priorities (not that there is not any of the latter though).
My questions are, as I continue to read through the novel, will Gibson continue to provide intricate details that will leave me wondering and disoriented? Or will he begin to hone in on the characters and plot of the novel in further detail? Or perhaps both? Lastly, how will he be using this new style to create a story that leaves (if at all) a lasting impression? Or will I end up just being disoriented and mind-blown the entire time?
