The sky above LabKitty was the color of Blogger, tuned to a review of Neuromancer
The story is a tad brief, the characters take a backseat to the technoweirdness, and the bad guy's denouement is a little curt. But, yikes, this is the book that started it all. And the story has yet to be ruined by Hollywood.
Neuromancer by WIlliam Gibson. Ace Science Fiction (1984)
Here is my review.
Plot Summary
while (spoilers) {
Meet Case, archetypical lone wolf hack0r. His nervous system was modified to interface with whatever it is the internet will become, but he's been recently re-n00bed to rob him of this ability after crossing the Wrong People. Fortunately, he is soon recruited for a mysterious job by a mysterious babe in black leather with mirrored eye implants and razor fingernails. Her name? Molly. The job? Some mysterious ex-military guy Armitage will restore his hacker union card in return for help with a mysterious job. Case agrees, and they take him to the vet and get him fixed.
First thing, they must heist the Dixie Fishhead, a "construct" of world-famous albeit dead hacker Dixie Flatline, whose noggin was downloaded into a lunch pail thingy to which you can ask questions and it will respond just like the live Dixie would have. This is locked away in Maximum Security Place, so our heroes recruit the help of the Panther Moderns, a sort of Ken Kesey Merry Pranksters cum Molly Razor fan club (think: 4chan with small-arms training). Molly sneaks into the facility and grabs the Fishhead. The Panther Moderns run interference and she escapes with Dixie unscathed.
Next, it's off to Istanbul to pick up final team member Peter Riviera, a skeevy well-dressed mutant whose unique skill set includes the ability to project hallucinations, like that Star Trek episode where Captain Pike got snatched by those big-headed effeminate alien dudes and Spock was all shouty and had wild untamed eyebrows, before Roddenberry pulled Nimoy aside and told him for the love of God dial it down a few notches. Riviera is not all that keen about going on the mission. Case et al. try to shanghai him armed with neurosuppressants to keep his mind gremlins at bay. Peter fights back via hallucinations in what may well be the most glorious scene of WTF ever committed to page in the history of the printed word. Seriously. It's like a cat fight in your brain.
Our heroes manage to get Riviera under control, then it's up to the Straylight Run, orbiting villa of the unimaginably rich and powerful Tessier-Ashpool family and home of Lady 3Jane, CEO and current custodian of the T-A family fortune who's packing some rather serious daddy issues. Oh, there's also lots of Jamaican astronauts, one of whom is named Maelcum.
Armitage puts the plan into action. As near as I can grok, it involves breaking into the T-A family computer for some reason, which requires a simultaneous three-prong attack of 1) hacking past the system security in cyberspace, 2) inserting a key into a special computer terminal shaped like a head located somewhere in the Straylight villa, and 3) getting Lady 3Jane to speak a password. Case and Dixie will handle the hacking. Molly will cat burglar her way into the villa to find the key and the terminal. Peter will get Lady 3Jane to speak the password because, trust me, once you've seen Peter get freaky there's pretty much nothing he can't make you do.
Armitage books Peter at a local nightclub to do his thing as a poetry slam or whatever in order to attract the attentions of Lady 3Jane. On stage, Riviera reenacts the liner notes from Get 'em out by Friday, and Lady 3Jane invites him back to the villa to see her etchings.
Meanwhile, Molly has been sneaking through the underbelly of the Straylight villa with Case in cyber-tow. Here she breaks character and relates the story of her younger days when she made a fortune renting herself out as a meat puppet, which means exactly what you think it means. This causes her to turn off her WiFi distraught and head off alone. Without Molly's eyes and ears and other parts to guide him, Case cyberwanders smack dab into Wintermute. Wintermute kills Case.
Wintermute is an all-powerful artificial intelligence owned by the Tessier-Ashpools. It's hinted that he (it?) is behind the whole Mysterious Job, the true purpose of which may be to unite Wintermute with a second all-powerful artificial intelligence named -- wait for it -- Neuromancer. The merger will occur by 1) hacking past the system security in cyberspace, 2) inserting a key into a special computer terminal shaped like a head located somewhere in the Straylight villa, and 3) getting Lady 3Jane to speak a password. How killing Case furthers the plan is rather murky at this point.
Case is reunited in the afterlife with long-suffering girlfriend Linda, who I forgot to tell you was tragically killed by street toughs back in chapter one to give Case some gravitas. Now the two of them can spend eternity together, eternity in this case being a nice beach community (think: Rehoboth or Outer Banks off season). They kick around a bit, until one day a creepy little kid shows up.
Sike! It was just Wintermute screwing with Case's head, or heart as it were, which Wintermute stopped for a few minutes to set up the meet and greet in cyberspace with his creepy kid avatar at the faux afterlife beach. One would think an artificially intelligent supercomputer and a world-famous cyber-criminal mastermind might be able to hook up via email or Skype or whatever but apparently not. Maybe Wintermute was still on Friendster or, you know, big-endian.
Case decides to dump Linda, what with her being dead dead and not just Wintermute dead, and heads off to get back into Molly's cyberpants, demonstrating not only is he a jerk in real life, he's also a jerk in the afterlife. Ladies, don't get hung up on computer programmers, they'll just hurt you. Meanwhile, Molly has happened upon Lady 3Jane and Peter at the villa, the two of them, it turns out, old friends from way back. Peter has spilled the heist beans. Lady 3Jane has Molly whomped on. To add insult to injury, they encase Molly's dangerous hands in giant foam bowling balls.
There's another beach interlude where Case meets Neuromancer.
Lady 3Jane takes a sudden shine to Molly and tells her Ninja bodyguard Hideo to dispatch Peter. They tussle. Molly uses her feminine jowls to get Lady 3Jane to remove the bowling balls. They tussle. Case and Maelcum burst onto the scene. Everyone tussles.When the dust settles, Case, Molly, and Maelcum have 3Jane at the magic head-shaped terminal. Dixie hacks into the system and Molly puts the screws to milady for the password, who sings like a bird. Neuromancer and Wintermute become one.
The End.
Oh, Armitage has a 'Nam flashback while at the controls of his space plane and augers it in.
The End.
VERDICT
If none of this made any sense, it's because it's just that kind of book.
Neuromancer was the paterfamilias and dura mater of its genre. No Neuromancer, no cyberpunk. No Matrix, no Neal Stephenson, no Ghost in the Shell -- in fact a three-foot block of empty shelf in the anime section of your local video store before it went out of business. Some credit Gibson with creating other genres such as Steampunk, or claim his influence can be seen in the noir palette of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Some say Gibson even sparked the real-world creation of technologies that inhabit his fictional world, although this is a bit of a stretch. It's one thing to imagine a graphics-based computer interface. It's something altogether different to write the quarter million lines of EPROM firmware that gets it done.
Still, for a thousand wannabe cyberpunk authors, discovering Neuromancer was like Ed Wood discovering Racket Girls. As long as there are nerds who read books, there will be kick-ass women in black leather with Samurai swords inexplicably appearing in boardrooms and on spaceships.
That's not to say Neuromancer is without its faults. In the swirl of technoweirdness, Gibson often forgets to spell out just what the heck is going on. Sometimes this works to spectacular effect, as in the hallucinogenic fight with Riviera. But it sometimes happens at major plot junctions where making the reader re-read to figure out what happened kills the pacing. Sometimes you want to go back and read Gibson's prose like an incredibly weird sonnet. Other times, however, you just want to know the protagonist went from point A to point B.
Gibson also got the future military history of the world wrong, with Armitage's backstory invoking a WW-III between the Soviets and the West. But so did most authors of the time. Explaining to anyone in the 80's that the two nuclear superpowers weren't going to knock heads eventually would have been a hard sell. I suppose if Gibson were writing Neuromancer today, Armitage would be a Gulf War vet and all the kids in the story would be playing Tank War Iran instead of Tank War Europa.
Finally, alas, Gibson grabs at the Gom Jabbar that so many science fiction authors have tried and died: the sex scene, with Case and Molly knocking boots in their Straylight hotel room. Gibson's stab at it isn't quite as cringe-inducing as a lot of his contemporaries but let's face it, he's no Danielle Steel. At least it's over quick, which come to think of it is a pretty accurate depiction of nerd sex.
But no matter. The paterfamilias and dura mater of the genre as I said, which I'll use here again just because it's so dang clever.
Besides, find me one nerd who doesn't get misty-eyed when they hear the phrase Love you, Cat Mother.
Grade: A
Neuromancer cover art claimed as fair use under U.S. Copyright law as the image(s) are low resolution and appear in an article or scholarly work reviewing the related material, and do not in a reasonable person's mind constitute an infringement of the owner's rights to receive compensation for the copyrighted work.
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