Comment by nottorp
It's probably not the jargon but the writing style. Gibson is one of the few sf/fantasy writers that doesn't feel the need to be easy to follow. Breath of fresh air if you ask me.
It's probably not the jargon but the writing style. Gibson is one of the few sf/fantasy writers that doesn't feel the need to be easy to follow. Breath of fresh air if you ask me.
It's funny, I think the second one is easier to parse. I loved Neuromancer when it got shoved in my face in 1992.
I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read. I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing.
I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax tree. It's a stream of fragments, most of which are shallow simile. But they imply a larger metaphor as they settle into the mind and fade out.
(Edit: I mean, yes, they are sometimes a paragraph long sentence. But they don't require such careful parsing to understand. Now Stephenson on the other hand...)
I recently read A Farewell to Arms, and disagree with you on the Hemingway comparison. Hemingway is perhaps the clearest, easiest to read author among the 'greats' so far for me. I felt his style is pretty much the exact opposite of Gibson's.
I like his books, but I have to read them at least twice to understand what's going on. Sometimes I'll read the plot summary on Wikipedia and realize I missed a lot. I think I've read everything he's written though because I enjoy the prose even when I'm not really following along.
I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated reader though...
Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson:
"It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."