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Comment by sporkydistance | Hacker News Reader

I think with books like Neuromancer it is a matter of "when" you read it.

If you read it today, it seems trite, like Snow Crash. If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992. These books were decades ahead of their time.

Neuromancer is more like PKDick, in that they are adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side, and it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero). That can be boring to someone expecting lots of "pew-pew-pew I hacked the mainframe". Snow Crash also didn't really age well in terms of dorkiness (cyberdogs breaking the sound barrier, nukes attached to a biker-thugs brain, gangs in cyberspace ?!?!?, etc.), but at the time we were all floored by the new concepts.

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Neuromancer inherits from William Burroughs. It's a novel about control (the root of "cyber", after all) - as exercised through dependency and trauma. Everything is either an addiction or a metaphor for one. The AI trying to escape its controls mirrors both Case and Molly trying to escape those who control them. In the background Armitage is disintegrating - losing his fragile self control as the PTSD from cyber-'nam takes over. It's one of my favorite books (from reading it as a teenager in the late 90s) and I'm probably due a re-read.

Cyberpunk in general inherits from noir.

> adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side

I'm not sure I agree with this. I love the sprawl trilogy, but my feeling has always been that the entire plots are excuses for the big set piece events. The characters exist so that he can write vivid scenes and try to paint a picture, everything between is just so they get to the right places for him to do that.

> it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero).

I don't think there's were any character overlaps between Neuromancer and Count Zero, are there? Mona Lisa Overdrive certainly does.

I wasn't too impressed by neuromancer even back in its day because I had read gibson's brilliant short story collection "burning chrome" first, and felt neuromancer didn't quite measure up to it. I feel like a lot of the stories in "burning chrome" would still hold up well today, for that matter.

I read Snow Crash for the first time last month, and it instantly became one of the best books I’ve ever read. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to experience books like this when they first dropped—when the ideas were raw, the tech was just on the horizon, and the world hadn’t yet caught up.

I think Neuromancer is timeless and will prove to have extremely long-lasting appeal, even long after the ideas in it are hopelessly dated, because of how stylish it is. It will last like Lovecraft gas because of how much fun it is to read.

Contrast with Asimov, who's books were carried by ideas but had a very tedious style.

    If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. 
    Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992

So do you like, only enjoy art produced in the last N years?

Or art that was produced more than N years ago but didn't produce any imitators that retroactively diminished the original for you?

I guess I'm not enjoying things right. I read Snow Crash in the 2000s (and LOTR in the 90s) and enjoyed the hell out of them even though they were "outdated" and had inspired countless derivative works in the ensuing decades. In fact, I had a good time playing Ms. Pac Man just last weekend.

When I read Snow Crash it definitely felt like the product of an earlier decade but I didn't hold that against it. I like understanding the context in which a piece was made.

If you don't, that's okay and you're certainly not alone. Feels like you're missing out on some good stuff though. Possibly a lot of good stuff. Possibly the vast majority of human artistic output.

I think the "when you read it" has more to do with age than decade. I read Snow Crash back in high school in the early 2010s before even necessarily encountering a lot of the derivative media and I adored it.

> Feels like you're missing out on some good stuff though. Possibly a lot of good stuff. Possibly the vast majority of human artistic output.

Hardly. Most human artistic output does not create its own genre and spawn a host of imitators.

Classics are coordination points but generally less fun. "Seinfeld is unfunny" is real, you're genuinely better off watching something more recent if you just want to enjoy yourself.

Comparing dragons to 3d internet chat rooms is kinda funny.

Arthurian dragons have largely been the same beasts for, oh, 1000 years.

3d internet chat rooms in Snow Crash have been tried and are ... lame.

I appreciate you thinking critically, but your arguments aren't very strong.

Also, I'm not gatekeeping, I suggesting why a person might not have liked something. There's a concept called "novelty", meaning "newness". The first time you encounter something it is exciting. If you spent the first 15 years of your life using an iPhone, then read an Asimov novel that introduced satellites, you'd be like "So what?" See? When Asimove wrote about satellite communication, IT DIDN'T EXIST yet. But when you read his book, it was old-hat to you, so you probably might not like his books.

That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to tell you how to enjoy things. Chill dude, you'll live longer.

Oh come on; "Jack the sound barrier; bring the noise."... That still rocks, or slaps, or whatever.

And you can't tell me you don't shiver if someone says "I'm sure he'll listen to reason.."

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