It was time to check Neuromancer. It has inspired lot of entertainment I like. There are lot of movies, games and comics inspired by Neuromancer. It is core part of cyberpunk genre. As such it feels familiar even first time. How ever it might not have been good idea to binge it right after 2001: A Space Odyssey. I listened audiobook. I am not sure if it was the text or performance but whole thing felt so continuous flow that it was hard to get what was important. Usually important moments have some sort of build up. Neuromancer is more of constant flow of words.
I had problem to follow different scenes. It felt like book had dream logic flow between scenes. I was understanding what was going on. Then narrator started to describe something and it felt like different scene with different characters. That happened several times. It could be the performance. In 2001: A Space Odyssey everything was clear. Neuromancer was harder to follow. Next book in Sprawl trilogy has different narrator. After it I know if it was the text or the narrator. In 2001 book explained what happened in the movie. This needs movie or comic book to tell what happened.
I went to Wikipedia to check what it says about the plot. Didn’t want to say anything stupid about the story. Even that was hard to follow. And I had just listened the book and was supposed to know the story. And Wikipedia left out couple scenes I wanted to know about. I guess I wasn’t only one having hard time following the story if even Wikipedia writers can’t summarize plot onto easily readable form.
All this may sound like I didn’t like the book. I can see why this is genre defining work. While listening I wanted to know where this is going. It keeps the speed up and throws something at you all the time. It is like any J.J. Abrams’ work where main goal is to keep the thing going on fast and afterwards you are left wondering what actually happened. Pack up you bags kids. Hurry up. We are leaving in half hour to Istanbul to new interesting adventure. No time to internalize what just happened. Unlike J.J. Abrams William Gibson has something to say. It is not style and form over substance.