★★★★★ Slightly diminished by the years

Neuromancer

William Gibson

I first read William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1986, I think, shortly after Count Zero came out. That's because I stumbled on Count Zero in an airport bookstore, and after reading it read everything I could find by Gibson. I loved it. I have since read and reread both Neuromancer and Count Zero more times than I remember, along with the other books of the Cyberspace trilogy.

This 2024 reread was provoked by the need for an audiobook. The narration by Robertson Dean is competent but not, in my opinion, particularly noteworthy. Perhaps for a book like this that is best -- one really doesn't need the narrator to make more of it than the splendid book it in fact is.

The 2004 edition of Neuromancer on which this audiobook is based contained two things that were new to me, an introduction entitled "The Sky Above the Port" by Gibson himself, and an afterword titled "Some Dark Holler" by Jack Womack. About Womack's afterword the less said, the better. It is exactly the kind of high-falutin horsepoop that brings the profession of literary criticism such disrepute among serious readers. Gibson's introduction, however, was valuable. It takes note of and explains with appropriate humility and perspective some of Gibson's personal history and how that contributed to the tech of the Sprawl.

I was also struck on this reread by something that was obvious to me the first time I read the Cyberspace trilogy -- Gibson is an artist, not an engineer or a scientist, and he really doesn't understand the technologies he writes about in any kind of depth or with any real insight. That is to say, he is not a member of my tribe and is unable to properly deploy the totems we use to recognize each other. Despite the credit he gets and deserves for imagining Cyberspace, the Cyberspace trilogy was not a good imagining of the coming future. The world since 1984 hasn't looked like the one Gibson imagined, nor are we, as far as I can see, heading towards that imagined world.

Thus my title "Slightly diminished by the years. I still judge Neuromancer to be a great novel, worthy of the prizes it has won. But it now appears lesser to me than it did in 1986.

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