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Comment by cherryteastain | Hacker News Reader

> I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences.

This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invented multiple fictional languages and his books tend to have 100+ pages of appendices explaining everything, but his prose flows so naturally.

Perhaps Neuromancer would benefit from an ebook edition incorporating a recent CRPG video game innovation, where in universe terms in text are highlighted and you can click/tap on the highlighted terms to get a little tooltip box explaining what the term is.

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I read it in the 90s and found the opposite experience: it's evocative. It doesn't describe things, instead it gives hints and lets your imagination build its own answers.

Exactly. If anything, Gibson's evocative style reminded me of the Strugatsky brothers; while the story is different, you get this sense of looming despair all through the book.

I struggled with Neuromancer and never finished it (as far as I recall), and I've later discovered I have aphantasia.

I haven't tried reading it again since but I can't help but feel it's related, as I really struggled to get into it, despite reading and enjoying a lot of various sci-fi.

It's probably not the jargon but the writing style. Gibson is one of the few sf/fantasy writers that doesn't feel the need to be easy to follow. Breath of fresh air if you ask me.

I like his books, but I have to read them at least twice to understand what's going on. Sometimes I'll read the plot summary on Wikipedia and realize I missed a lot. I think I've read everything he's written though because I enjoy the prose even when I'm not really following along.

I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated reader though...

Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson:

"It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."

It's funny, I think the second one is easier to parse. I loved Neuromancer when it got shoved in my face in 1992.

I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read. I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing.

I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax tree. It's a stream of fragments, most of which are shallow simile. But they imply a larger metaphor as they settle into the mind and fade out.

(Edit: I mean, yes, they are sometimes a paragraph long sentence. But they don't require such careful parsing to understand. Now Stephenson on the other hand...)

I recently read A Farewell to Arms, and disagree with you on the Hemingway comparison. Hemingway is perhaps the clearest, easiest to read author among the 'greats' so far for me. I felt his style is pretty much the exact opposite of Gibson's.

>as exhausting to read as Neuromancer

the exhaustion is the point. Gibson is great because he turned the essence of the genre, media oversaturation, into a prose style. Cyberpunk is all about everything being in your face. Things are flashing by, too fast, too dense, you're disoriented, etc.

You aren't supposed to understand or put every term under a microscope, you should feel as disoriented as the characters. One of the strongest aspects of the book is how successful he is at making you feel as if you're hooked into something running on 120% speed.

Not unlike Gene Wolfe in the Book of the New Sun, where Wolfe recombines words and invents language as the conceit is that the narrator is translating from a future work into contemporary English, having to make use of words that don't yet exist. You're not supposed to grab the dictionary and try to figure out what each term means, you're supposed to take it in as you go on.

Comparing anyone to Tolkien is massively unfair. Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LotR for about a decade. It is going to be extremely hard to match these expectations for other authors.

You're suggesting their arent any other authors who have taken over a decade to write a book? Prousts' In Search of Lost Time took 13 for example.

You are ignoring the part about being a linguist, though. Spending 10 years writing a book is also not quite rare.

Sylvain Neuvel is also a linguist. But I’m sure this will also be disqualified because he’s in a different genre.

tbh I don't think "researches language structure" has much at all of a correlation with "uses language in a pheasant manner".

it happens to with Tolkein. but it's kinda like claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good video game developer simply because games use compilers.

I've been comparing Iliad translations. Some of best classicists, who best understand Greek and the original text, are lousy poets.

Far too late to edit now, but I got a laugh out of the autocorrect "pheasant" at least

Huge Tolkien fan here. But the list of great authors and great books is long. It is certainly not unfair to compare Nabokov, Rushdie, Kingsolver, Ferrante, etc etc etc to Tolkien. Some were linguists, translators, literature professors. Some were journalists. Some had no obvious qualifications at all. Some wrote their novels very quickly, some took decades. Shakespeare and Dickens were not linguists and (mostly) wrote very quickly.

> Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for about a decade

This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.

There are worlds of difference between analysing the syntax and semantics of languages in a structured and scientific way, and writing "good" prose (as subjective as that is).

I guess you're just a huge fan of Tolkien?

In which case, have you read https://archive.is/20241231024916/https://www.newyorker.com/... in which Michael Moorcock calls Tokein's work:

"...a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class".

Which I'm not saying should change your opinion on anything, I just find it's always a good exercise to find the juiciest criticism of one's darlings.

English is not my first language, and Tolkien's prose is one of the easiest English language texts I've ever read. Even the occasional stylizations to old scaldic verse is very easy to comprehend.

Yeah, my thought reading Neuromancer too. I'm fine with Clockwork-Orange-esque jargon in prose, but even removing that, Gibson's text still didn't flow in a story-telling (conversational?) way for me. It was too stilted or something.

I suspect talking to Gibson in person probably requires a good deal of studied attention as well. That can be exhausting for an entire novel.

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