I just finished the audiobook of Neuromancer a week ago, and I didn't really enjoy it. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it. I love other what I think of as similar books like Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I had high hopes for Neuromancer, which maybe that was part of it, but I just didn't enjoy it. It kind of turned into a slog and I nearly gave up at around 90%, but just pushed through because I was so close.
I think Neuromancer has suffered a lot from what TVTropes calls the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" problem: successive works have borrowed from it so completely that it's difficult to read the book now and get the same effect as when it was published, because it feels so full of cyberpunk cliches. But don't forget that pretty much all those cliches originated here and were totally new at the time.
In terms of milieu and ideas, definitely. But Gibson's plots clank along in pretty much every novel-length work of his I've read. It's a problem of mechanics and storytelling at that point, I think.
I read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around.
For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all.
I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.)
To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.
I feel like the biggest criticism I can make of Gibson is that he plots.
Most novels have a plot. But the good ones don't let you in on it. As you say, the characters rush around for MacGuffins, and you characterized it as "creaky"--that's a good word for it. I have not always been the biggest Stephen King fan (as an author; growing up in Maine, I've always been a fan of King-the-person) but On Writing is an excellent book. I don't have my copy right here so I can't quote what he says about plotting (paraphrased: "try not to") but this quote from an interview with Goodreads resonates strongly with me:
"I start a book like Doctor Sleep [his most recent book] knowing just two things: the basic situation and that the story will create its own patterns naturally and organically if I follow it fairly...and by fairly I mean never forcing characters to do things they wouldn't do in real life...For me, the first draft is all about story. I trust that some other part of me—an undermind—will create certain patterns."
So long as your beginnings and ends are only modestly far apart, short stories (and I again agree that Burning Chrome is probably his best work) let you get away with a lot more of this. But novella and novel-length works can't hide the machinery of a plotted-out story as well unless you are inordinately good at it. (And I mean, this is a ding against authors like J.R.R. Tolkien as much as Gibson; it's not like he isn't in good company with this weakness.)
> I feel like the biggest criticism I can make of Gibson is that he plots.
Interesting. I've seen him twice at book signings and both times he said that he specifically does not plot beforehand. He starts with characters and "follows" them through the story. He did say he often ends up at a certain in the novel where he has to chart out what's going on so he can finish though. On the other hand, if I remember correctly he's said he's a fan of old-school pulp sci-fi which has a lot of plotting and he's perfectly fine with that even if it offends lit-crit types.
Good points. The crux of the problem is really in this distinction between plot and story.
A great plot-driven writer who manages a superb synthesis of both is Iain M. Banks. One of his less well-known books, Feersum Endjinn, is a favourite of mine. Its journey is very linear, but it's a journey, a story that happens to a character. The skeleton of the plot is under a thick skin of emotional resonance. It's a good story.
You could say that Gibson is a writer who is uninterested in plots (to the extent that he's not able to come up with an original one) but who, paradoxically, still manages to write extremely plot-driven books.
> Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins;
I see this as a nod to old detective pulp novels and film noir which often have these kind of plots: a mysterious backer (sometimes a rich man, sometimes a femme fatale) sends a detective on a mission to find something or someone. Over the course of following the leads, getting in fights, etc. it becomes apparent that the thing in question is either irrelevant to the larger plot that's revealed, or that things aren't what they seem about the mission, or both.
It's such a cyberpunk trope that in pretty much every RPG I've played in or heard of set in Cyberpunk or Shadowrun, everyone knows not to trust the client.
It's actually a surprise when they don't betray you. And if they follow through on the contract, you're only waiting for when they'll have lulled you into complacency and then turn on you.
Characterisation is certainly the weak point of a lot of sci-fi. You could make the argument that distancing/alienation is part of the aesthetic, but I'm not expecting that to be very convincing.
Burning Chrome is excellent, but the emotional weight is all dark.
This interview with Wired https://www.wired.com/1999/01/ebay/ actually made Gibson click as a person for me. Especially some of the odder more obsessive thematic details in the novels.
I agree with a lot of this. He's said himself that when he got the contract for a novel, he didn't know how to write one, and was kind of panicked about being boring. That's why the first 60 pages or so of the book (through the Sense/Net strike to get the Dixie Flatline's cartridge) is like a nonstop adrenaline rush. It's so exciting! I had no idea science fiction could be like that, the first time I read it.
I strongly agree that his best work was in Burning Chrome. Unfortunately, the only film adaptations of his work we have are two stories from that collection, and they were both awful in different ways. Johnny Mnemonic misses all but the barest outlines of the story - where's Molly? I can't believe they gave up the fight on the "Killing Floor" with Molly vs the vatgrown ninja in favor of blowing up a bridge. Sigh. New Rose Hotel, on the other hand, hewed very close to the original story - which was fine, except the story was only six pages long.
As an aside, I have a band called The Gernsback Continuum, after the short story.
I agree with the thread sentiment that the short stories are better than the novels and novellas, though I enjoyed them when I read them in the 1980's and again, maybe less so, recently. But Gernsback Continuum really resonated with me and I love the idea and metaphor that these zeigeist-driven unrealized futures exist and shimmer at the edge of reality. Visible to the tired, drugged, and crazy it's solidly in the same camp as Burroughs and Dick.
Yeah, I love it too. The band name followed on the musical inspiration for the band, which was to play "What the future used to sound like". I'm inspired by the grand history of science fiction themed music - early electronic soundtracks like Forbidden Planet, Afrofuturist sounds like Parliament-Funkadelic and 1970s Miles Davis, Ziggy-era Bowie, Blade Runner, huge swaths of prog-rock... And here we are, living in that future, and it doesn't sound a damn bit like what we were told it would sound like.
I'm also writing some songs that are actually science fiction short stories, set to music. It's an interesting challenge.
It's not just you, I read it about a year ago after all these years of hearing its praises. Clearly it was pioneering work that influenced many science fiction movies/books/games, but it was an atrocious read. There isn't many books where I've had to force myself to as you put it, slog my way to the end. I also thought Snowcrash was awful though, with that terrible third person narrative and amateur writing style.
Agreed - although visionary, Gibson's writing was not yet mature. I find his more recent Blue Ant series much more enjoyable, and while less technologically visionary, more insightful into human nature and interactions.
Is it just me?