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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

It's a funny coincidence, I've never read Neuromancer, and talking with a friend of mine three days ago he said, "I thought we read Neuromancer at the same time and discussed it? You should really read it now!"

I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.

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The prose is the art. In Blade Runner, the world is built with dense backdrops of an alien city, people walking around in strange clothes, etc. All that is imprinted on you without a single line of dialogue.

With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.

If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.

This. I recall an interview with Gibson where he said that he hung out in watering holes frequented by IT folks. He spent a lot of time picking up the atmosphere and cadence of the language, which he imitated in his works.

I was alive at that time and working in tech. That paragraph is not a good imitation of the atmosphere and cadence of the language. :-)

Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?" stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers to the question are no better than a random man on the street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile => Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense like Johnny Mnemonic.

I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.

As the Romans say, "there's no point arguing about taste." I find Gibson's stories hard to follow in some cases, but at the same time he is very inventive when it comes to language and mood. I find it worth the effort. To calibrate, my favorite sci-fi author is a toss-up between Stephenson (wildly entertaining) and LeGuin (digs into human relations and society like almost no other author).

> The prose is the art

I get that, I'm just expressing my preference for ideas over writing style.

i’m not a huge long form reader, but neuromancer was quick and terminology reused heavily. you will pick up the slang without too much difficulty. i wouldn’t let the sample paragraph color your view that heavily.

Honestly though that paragraph does have meaning to it. Simstim is a thing. Is it a quite adventurous description of it? You may not "fully" get the description at times. However I never read it and went "This is garbage."

In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.

I didn't say it doesn't have meaning. I'm saying that I prefer simple language around complex topics, rather than the other way around. As one example, the discussion of "quality" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- the language isn't difficult or opaque, but that's a concept that has stuck with me since I first read it in the '80s.

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