NEUROMANCER by William Gibson (1984)
I have a difficult relationship with this novel.
I know that it is one of the most groundbreaking and significant SF works ever written but each time I pick it up I always get lost in the dense prose and what hits me as an overwhelming rush of jargon.
As most will know, this was where the word ‘cyberspace’ was first popularized and for that alone Gibson is assured of immortality, at least until the wires of that feed the human race are permanently unplugged.
He brilliantly describes the then fledgling internet as a “consensual hallucination” and the lead character Case is paid to hack into “the infinite neuroelectric void of the matrix”. Continue reading
Not much time for blogging today as I spent a hot and mostly bothered day in Bologna conducting interviews with prospective primary school English teachers in a poorly air-conditioned room. I was practically reduced to a blob
“I dislike new books. It’s like drinking wine that’s not ready. When my first novel was published – Gun, With Occasional Music – I insisted the jacket be made to look like it was old. The gimmick was that it was going to look like a pulp paperback, even though it was a brand new hardcover. I wanted to be a writer like Philip K. Dick or Charles Willeford, or some others I revered who’d been published only in these disreputable, ephemeral ways, and who you could find only in used-book stores. I wanted to be out of print even before I was in print”
