Book club - The first book we're reading is Neuromancer

[Denyer]

I didn't really like/understand Neuromancer

Seems as good a note as any to start on. Which bits didn't you like/understand? Any parts or ideas you did like?

[Metal Vendetta]

I found it tough the first time, I think. Repeated reading does reap rewards. It's a very jargon-heavy book, particularly to start with. I know certain parts I had to read several times before I knew quite what was happening. And even now, if you asked me to explain how the splindle works, I'm not quite sure I could tell you...

[Denyer]

Splindle?

Yeah, it is very dense prose, and the effect of throwing readers straight in and out of their depth could be a little off-putting. It isn't something you can avoid much unless you read a lot of science-fiction, and I think avoiding it would be losing one of the main pleasures the book has to offer -- it really forces you to pay attention to the words Gibson has chosen for each scene and set-piece, even on re-reading.

It has several effects advantageous to the story, though -- for a start, it presents the impression of a world we're just being presented with the iceberg tip of. In conjunction with a lot of short sentence work, it keeps things fast-paced. Because there are hints of our world in there (an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is 'obviously' hardware of some variety, Hosaka sounds like a credible manufacturer, there are references to Sony and Disney, etc) we can make the intuitive leaps quite rapidly after a bit of exposure to the style. Julius Deane is a link to our era, too, as are Maelcum and the reggae community.

In many ways, the manner in which we're occasionally stranded and manipulated mirrors the way the characters progress through the story; they don't learn of their manipulation until much later, as we don't get major plot revelations until the second half of the book. The extent to which each character has their own slang also provides something for us to latch onto, whilst at the same time distancing us.

Does everyone else find Case a sympathetic character?

[KingMob]

OK, something to do with Neuromancer was on my mind earlier, but I'll get to that in a sec. First I want to try and reply to Denyer's question - although it has now been a good while since I read the text and I'm not disposed to re-reading or checking things at the mo', so forgive any grievious errors or vagueness.

Case and sympathy; sure, I found him to be a sympathetic character. I'm not certain if cyberpunk makes all it's main characters inherently sympathetic, I came to Neuromancer late, long after being exposed to other stuff, so the idea of the cyber-protagonist-narrator being likable despite various levels of what may be considered personality or moral defects wasn't troublesome at all. Although I do dimly recall having some sort of minor problem with him during the hedonistic sequence on the station the first time I read it, but I can't remember what exactly was on my mind...
And to add in teh obligatory wanky reaching thoughts, Case is sympathetic in another sense; his tech-voyeur experiences with Molly are literally sympathetic, aren't they? Same with the ghost-program that rides him in the Matrix. He's in tune with them and their feelings, their thoughts and nerves.
Anyway, enough babbling on that.

What I was thinking about earlier was that someone was asking me about female characters and the positioning of female characters 'as' male characters, and the whole idea of female versions of male icons/archetypes. My eye falls on my X-Men 2 DVD box and I started waffling on about Lady Deathstrike and Wolverine.
And for some reason I noticed for the first time that Deathstrike's inbuilt blades are basically the same weapon as Molly carries (albeit a bit longer).
Boy, did I feel stupid.
So anyway, I was wondering how people reacted to Molly's character. Does she just read like a noir femme-fatale with blades and shades, or is she a significant development of that type of female character?

Um, I have a few ideas on it myself, but I just wanted to throw discussion of Molly out there, as well as Case.

[Eline]

I didn't really like/understand Neuromancer

Seems as good a note as any to start on. Which bits didn't you like/understand? Any parts or ideas you did like?

Right from the start it felt like I didn't really understand what was going on, and the language was at times pretty difficult, with all the technical terms and such.

Maybe therefore it didn't appeal much to me. I though it would be a fun and interesting book, and the difficulty put me off. It could be because it's my first cyberpunk book and I'm not used to the language/plot.

I think it required too much effort on my part, and I didn't enjoy the book that much to put the effort in it. There were of course parts I did like, but not enough to want to thoroughly understand the book and read it a few times.

This I don't like, because I always thought I was a book-addict, and the first book we chose was one I did not like or understand.

Maybe I need to try harder.

[sprunkner]

Anyone ready to start on American Gods yet?

[Death's Head]

Next on my list i will be readinf Francis Wheen's 'How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World' - even tho i know the answer is: Impy.

I'm reading this at the mo; it's bloody good isn't it?

Re: Neuromancer

I love this book. I'll admit it, I'm a huge cyberpunk junkie, which is not exactly fashionable, particularly in science fiction, where it is generally considered a dead genre, milked to death by dozens of copycats.

But sod 'em. I can't get enough of it; Blade Runner, Gibson, walking in Picadilly at night, in Camden market in the rain eating noodles and ogling strangely dressed folk on the stalls...the atmosphere it conjures up is irresistible to me (I feel similarly about film noir, which is in many ways an antecedent of cyberpunk).

An interesting anecdote about the book; Gibson, when writing it, had no knowledge of computers or computing technology; he even wrote the thing on an old typewriter. It's funny, then, how much our current technology mirrors what he envisaged; perhaps similar to the way Arthur C Clarke is supposed to have 'predicted' satellites, and various other technologies.

If you feel like trying some cyberpunk with a difference, Alexander Besher puts an Eastern-European spin on the genre in his trilogy; "Rim" (most unfortunate name), "Mir" and...bah, I can't remember the third. But there is one, and they're bloody good. An interesting development he deals with in 'Mir' are 'intelligent tattoos' that are encoded, and can leap from the body into cyberspace.

Also, there's the recently released "Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore", by a Spanish writer whose name also escapes me. It's very good, reminding me intensely of the movie 'Cypher', with Jeremy Northam, another excellent entry into the cyberpunk/dystopia canon.

[Shanti418]

So is there ever going to be a second book in the Book Club?

[Impactor returns 2.0]

can we dump this thread and choose another book please?

[Denyer]

I think we can un-sticky this, anyway. Not sure if anyone is up for another book...