Comment by gcanyon

Comment by gcanyon 19 hours ago

It's a funny coincidence, I've never read Neuromancer, and talking with a friend of mine three days ago he said, "I thought we read Neuromancer at the same time and discussed it? You should really read it now!"

I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.

mingus88 19 hours ago

The prose is the art. In Blade Runner, the world is built with dense backdrops of an alien city, people walking around in strange clothes, etc. All that is imprinted on you without a single line of dialogue.

With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.

If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.

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hodgesrm 18 hours ago

This. I recall an interview with Gibson where he said that he hung out in watering holes frequented by IT folks. He spent a lot of time picking up the atmosphere and cadence of the language, which he imitated in his works.

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- gcanyon 16 hours ago
  
  I was alive at that time and working in tech. That paragraph is not a good imitation of the atmosphere and cadence of the language. :-)
  
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  tialaramex 14 hours ago
  
  Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?" stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers to the question are no better than a random man on the street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile => Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense like Johnny Mnemonic.
  I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.
  
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gcanyon 16 hours ago

> The prose is the art
I get that, I'm just expressing my preference for ideas over writing style.

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nickthegreek 19 hours ago

i’m not a huge long form reader, but neuromancer was quick and terminology reused heavily. you will pick up the slang without too much difficulty. i wouldn’t let the sample paragraph color your view that heavily.

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brianjlogan 19 hours ago

Honestly though that paragraph does have meaning to it. Simstim is a thing. Is it a quite adventurous description of it? You may not "fully" get the description at times. However I never read it and went "This is garbage."

In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.

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gcanyon 16 hours ago

I didn't say it doesn't have meaning. I'm saying that I prefer simple language around complex topics, rather than the other way around. As one example, the discussion of "quality" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- the language isn't difficult or opaque, but that's a concept that has stuck with me since I first read it in the '80s.

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