William Gibson, _Neuromancer_

I READ LITTLE genre fiction, but as a person who teaches literature, I feel I should at least be familiar with some of the classics. For  instance, I do not enjoy murder mysteries, but I have sampled Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, just for the sake of getting a sense of the genre; I'm also about halfway through the first volume of Game of Thrones. I even got all the way through Atlas Shrugged and Gone with the Wind. So, even though I do not enjoy science fiction, I felt a bit of an obligation to try this one. I read one of Gibson's more recent novels, Pattern Recognition, a few years ago, but this one from 1984 is the one most often cited as foundational, and furthermore it's a lot shorter than those Neal Stephenson books people keep urging me to read, so I gave it a spin.

Neuromancer established a template for a kind of science fiction called "cyberpunk" in that a lot of it is set in a virtual space created by an interactive computer network. As such, its progeny are legion, and it can justly be called prescient, as it anticipates IT developments that would only be coming along ten and twenty years later.

Found myself wondering, though, why did they not call it "cybernoir." Case, the novel's main character, is a disgraced computer jockey who is commissioned by a mysterious party to penetrate and obtain the secrets of another mysterious party--which sounds like the opening of any Philip Marlowe case (which is why, I decided, he was called "Case"). Like Marlowe or Sam Spade or any of their innumerable epigones, Case has a wounded romantic core throbbing deep under a thick hide of cynicism. Like Marlowe or Spade, he begins to have as many questions about whom he is working for as he does about the target of his efforts. As he get deeper and deeper into the tangled web of...

...you know, to be honest, I never figured out exactly what the MacGuffin in this plot was. But then, I didn't understand what was going on in The Glass Key either. There's enough in the style of the thing to keep pulling one along, though. Gibson is a bit like Chandler on LSD: inches-thick grit rendered in vivid similes, but with an occasional psychedelic tinge:

The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A.

Nice, no? So, even though I never quite grasped what the internal power struggle at Tessier-Ashpool was actually about, toss me a few Maldoror-whiffy sentences like that and I will keep reading.