A younger friend of mine, who wasn’t around yet to experience cyberpunk when it was happening, bought himself a very nice, new release of the book with fantastic illustrations. I thought, “what the Hell? I’ll re-read “Neuromancer” with him; it will give us something to talk about.” Do you do that? Read books with your friends? Maybe this just shows how old I am, but I like being on the “same page” as it were with my people and have a chance to talk about what we read. But that’s me. I understand it’s not a popular attitude.
The first time I encountered “Neuromancer” was 1989, six years after it originally came out. And it was actually in the form of a video game. You see, Interplay came out with their version of “Neuromancer” on the C64, Apple ][ and IBM PC. A friend of mine, Sean Skeels, had landed a copy for his Apple ][ and I was at his place one afternoon, checking it out. So, we were both 12 at the time, and we could not make heads or tails of this thing. We were already familiar with “Bladerunner” and we liked the aesthetic of the mega city, and so the game had out attention. But it wasn’t really clear what you were supposed to do. You see, kids, over thirty years ago, our 8-bit computing platforms were REALLY strapped for resources and the whole idea of UI — how the user is supposed to interact with the game — was still very much in flux. In fact, it was kind of a wild west with absolutely no consistency: every game a new experiment. You could pirate the shit out of C64 games, but, if you didn’t have the manual, it would take some investment to even figure out how the game worked. I’m looking at you “Judge Dredd”! So, I borrowed the manual from Skeels and read through it, trying to understand this “game”. I got to the end and read in a credit that it was based on the book; so, I went out and bought the book, hoping to understand how better to play this game.
Now, remember, I’m 12 years old and tackling this text. It was intense and waaaay out of my ability to understand…and it was still so fucking cool. I couldn’t get enough of it. I started going after all the cyberpunk I could find. I tried “Islands in the Net” by Sterling; “Hardwired” and “Angel Station” by Williams; and I found a copy of “When Gravity Fails” by Effinger at my local library. I bought the first volume of the graphic novel that appeared…with no second volume to follow. I was hooked, even if I couldn’t fully understand what was happening. I even bought the first edition of “Cyberpunk” the TTRPG. The 2nd half of “Neuromancer” is set in space, and I just couldn’t picture what was happening. I was born in 1976 and just didn’t have the background in the 70s and early 80s space concepts to visualize what was being described; and it never even occurred to me to ask my parents. They had absolutely no interest in space. About the best I could do in my 12 year old imagination was picture vague, oceany, kinds of images as space is always navy coded. That was all I was bringing to the table.
But, like my experience with reading H.P. Lovecraft around the same time, I was just compelled to keep going. I was drawn in. I wanted to be Case. I wanted to live in a gritty, cyberpunk future and be a fixer in an exciting underworld that was so much better than my boring, suburban life. Whenever we would drive through downtown Seattle at night, I would look up at the skyscrapers that loom over the I5 corridor and imagine that I was in Ninsei, being an ‘artiste of the faster deal’. Do I have to remind you I was 12. No? Moving on.
Through the years, I have re-read the book. The last time was probably Seattle in 2008. I got on a Gibson kick and re-read most of his early stuff. The whole Sprawl series has become future of the past, for sure; but there’s still a lot that holds up in the Sprawl.
So, here we are in 2025 and I decided to give it another spin. This time I used Perplexity as basic annotation; if I would run across something that wasn’t clear, I would give it to Perplexity and get an explanation. This opened up the text for me in ways that I had missed in all my previous readings. For example, when Case finds Linda Lee for the first time you get this one word sentence: “Sanpaku.” So, I asked Perplexity, “what the fuck is ‘Sanpaku’?” And I get this whole thing about a Japanese idea of the whites of the eye when people are stressed: san = 3x and paku= eye white. Or “sarariman” which I had just read as some kind of sub-Sahara tribesman. Or the idea of a “zaibatsu”. Try looking that up in a dictionary in 1989! More life and subtlety started emerging from the text; it was cool and startling at the same time. And it left me with one question: how the fuck did this guy write this book in 1983?!
You see, kids, this was way back when the only search engine was microfiche. Go watch some of the early episodes of “X-Files” from season one, if you’d like to see a microfiche reader in use.
Now, I’m exaggerating a little for effect. It could be very doable to learn about Japanese society in the early 80s. I’m just lost as to how or why. I mean, it was spot on. Japan was on the rise in those days. But to have these little twists and hints, it insinuated a vast command of Japan as a culture. I tried to write my own cyberpunk stories when I was 13 and 14. My attempts at imitating Japanese culture were so laughable that I won’t repeat them here. It was not only striking — all these little details that you could pass over, but made the story so much more when you knew the secret language — but also so new for 1983.
And this book suffers no fools. Gibson really gives you a lot of credit as a reader; you are spoon fed nothing. It was finally in this reading — 36 years after my first attempt — that I finally realized that Freeside is a FUCKING O’NIEL CYLINDER!!!!! This very fact kind of pushes the story further past near-future and into far future. At this point, there are a few more things than just Case trying to sell hot RAM in the first chapters that date the novel. It’s definitely become future of the past with little hints and wisps in there that tickle those of us who lived through that time. When I talked about the book with my young friend — it’s also important to mention that this friend is not a native English speaker — he wasn’t that impressed; he thought the characters were flimsy and the story too hard to follow. He liked the first part in Chiba and the Sprawl, but got bored — or just confused — when the story went to Freeside. He wasn’t invested and just gave it a shoulder shrug. Good to read the “classic” and it’s full of great ideas, but not great execution. I argued with him, and tried to make my case. In the end, I’m just too bound to this thing through nostalgia: too tainted. It’s kind of like “Escape from New York”; if I hadn’t seen that movie as a wide-eyed 11 year old, would I find it so great today? Probably not.
Should you read this 42 year old sci-fi novel? Yes, but don’t expect it to hold your hand. It’s a great book that gives you, the reader, a lot of credit. And, in the age of second-screen, slop fests, it’s nice to be challenged by a unique thinker. But I guess that’s the kind of reader I am…
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