William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004) | Hacker News Reader

William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)

bearcave.com

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There seems to be a playlist on YouTube with slightly better quality: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYn090EvNBcinpVcrKNmY...

*EDIT:* There's also the CD version somewhere out there. Here's a Reddit post where someone ripped it (but didn't make it available): https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuromancer/comments/1gr7k4n/audiob...

thanks, the OP is of lesser quality compared to this one.

Yeah, I took a quick listen to OP -- unfortunately their mp3s are of very poor quality. I heard numerous glitches while listening :(

I think the audio quality gives this recording character. What could be more cyberpunk than hearing the quirky artifacts resulting from ripping an obsolete recording medium?

I was about to say, feels more of its time...

A little embarrassing when the 1970s technology is better than the 1990s.

‘Worse is better’ in effect. MP3 trades quality for convenience.

Edit: I read above that these particular MP3s are corrupted, so they have a serious enjoyability issue.

That's the point. CDs have error correction to handle corruption. MP3 has nothing. A complete downgrade in robustness.

With an advantage in compactness that makes them easier to distribute. That trade off is their point.

That wasn't the MPEG design goal. It was to stream video through a distribution network where dropouts would be tolerated as part of doing business. People were accustomed to snowy analog broadcast video. That is more disruptive when listening to purely audio. This is incidentally why CDs had their error handling significantly improved over Phillips' original prototype which would have been much more susceptible to scratches if commercialized.

No I know but I mean it has actual mp3 encoding errors because the files are getting corrupted over time lol, like it's an issue in the storage medium not the original analog-to-digital conversion :(

Examples in the following file http://bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/Tape1a.mp3 :

0:40, 1:04, 1:13, 1:21, 2:18 ... I mean.. the files are basically ruined :\

There was a wetransfer link but that expired. Has anyone got a torrent for the CD Version? Or perhaps a reddit acount to contact that OP to get another download for it? If you can make it available i can seed it indefinetly

I have the CD version, but I stupidly re-encoded it to something like 256kbps CBR MP3 back in 2012. Still, the fidelity is far greater than what was shared here.

I can uploaded it somewhere if you'd like.

Edit: Here you go: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MvEQd-V3Ma86XMnQYpCa...

Please share this far & wide. I have a busy night ahead of me or I'd take the time to upload it to IA.

The CD set is ISBN 1-57042-156-0. There are two available on ebay, one at ~$2,500 USD and the other (in worse shape) for $450.

I think the mp3 might have to do for now. :) Thanks for sharing.

You're very welcome! Please pass it along.

I managed to snag a set of the CD's. I'll post the FLAC files once they arrive and I can rip them.

YES!!!!! THANK YOU!!!!!

Not sure if anyone will see this - but I ripped the CD's at level 5 flac. Hopefully the share works. I haven't used limewire.com for this before.

Normally I wouldn't do this, but there's no way other reasonable way to acquire them now.

https://limewire.com/d/kyg1E#4nQ9kdF9g5

Thanks!

256kbit CBR MP3 is pretty good for spoken word material

Agreed. With that being said, I meant that it was a stupid move from an archival POV.

Is it though? Voice consumes so much less sonic bandwidth than music. I imagine the codec places extra emphasis on faithfully reproducing voices, since our brains are so wired to perceive them. A 256kbps spoken word recording is going to be a lot higher quality, comparatively, than a musical recording.

I meant "archival" in an absolute/save-all-the-exact-bits sense.

For whatever reason, if someone were interested in knowing exactly which bits were on the CDs, my copy wouldn't suffice.

Trust me, I know I wouldn't be able to hear the difference in an ABX test.

Nah. Even at 128kbps for voice mp3 is completely transparent. Try an ABX sometime.

I meant "archival" in an absolute/save-all-the-exact-bits sense.

Trust me, I know very well that I would not be able to hear the difference in an ABX test, even with incredible equipment.

That's why like-minded HN users are here ;-)

I uploaded your MP3s to Internet Archive for all to enjoy: https://archive.org/details/william-gibson-neuromancer-abrid...

Thank you!!!

Can you please edit the metadata to mention that it's from the CD?

Thank you!

In the article there is link to William Gibson, "No Maps for these Territories". That is broken. Is that somewhere else also?

https://youtu.be/qIDVvhy9Z0I

Giblophile so encountered this years ago...definitely worth a watch.

I listened to Neuromancer on a long drive one time, and I will say that it's a wonderful book but not one that's particularly suited to the audiobook medium. It's hard to follow at times because it avoids a lot of big picture narrative and instead focuses on very small scale scenes of events happening within a broader story. It means that it can be confusing at times, as you are often as in the dark as the characters are.

This is an abridged version, so maybe it streamlines some aspects of the narrative, so take that into account.

I’ve tried to listen to a book on tape on a long drive twice. And each time I was lucky to not drive into an abutment. For whatever reason, the droning just knocks me unconscious.

Talk radio is ok, sports radio. I’ve listened to more radio plays with multiple speakers. Those are ok.

But books on tape, nope. Too dangerous for me.

I also listened to it as an audiobook and while I very much got the vibe, I have no idea what was going on, which is kinda rare (I listen to a lot of audiobooks). It's as if I didn't even read it... buy kinda did. I duno.

i've read neuromancer at least five times and i still feel like i never actually read it. it's a weirdly-written book with little environmental exposition - but i still love it.

Came to say exactly this. It's my favorite, but I still feel like I haven't read it after like 5 reads.

Same. I've probably read it 7 times now, counting a recent listen to the audiobook version on Youtube mentioned above. And I could still read it again tomorrow and I think I'd feel like it was a brand new story.

And truth be told, I probably will read it again, although it might not be tomorrow. :-)

Every time I read it I catch something I missed previously. Feels true of all the sprawl and bridge books.

There's something magical about a strongly consistent fictional world where all the characters understand the world and what's happening but the reader is baffled. It elevates the experience of visiting a strange new place to a new level of immersion.

I had the same experience reading neuromancer in the last year. I felt like I got the vibe of what was going on, but struggled to understand the details and figure out what was actually happening in the story.

I think ambiguity is somewhat intended. It also is continued in the rest of the trilogy. Some things are clearly left for the reader to guess or to interpret. It does make it a not very easy read.

I've read it probably four times over the decades, most recently this year. I think I more or less have a handle on the story now, but after the first read I remember having been sort of confused.

There is a BBC Audio drama of Neuromancer that is 1:56 long.

It is excellent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo

I haven't listened to the audio book of Neuromancer but I re-read it a few weeks back. The audio play I still go back to once in a while as well.

Two minutes hardly seems enough time to do the story justice.

it's 2 hours

1:56 here refers to the aspect ratio, meaning 1 high and 56 long. So it is actually really long.

Actually it is 1 wide and 56 high, as in 16:9.

lol, what? It's an hour and 56 minutes long is all.

"Some things happen, an space station happens, some AI happens, and in the end, our protagonist figures out that he's kind of insignificant despite being there for all of it."

I thought it was just me. I gave up on reading the book midway,because I was confused most of the time, and found it hard to engage.

It happened to me too, and I read a lot.

I had to read Neuromancer twice; once to learn the world, then once to actually enjoy the story.

Same here. First read through I picked up a little bit but finished mostly confused. I basically powered through the last half of the book.

Then I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and realized how much I missed or misunderstood.

After that I read the book again and enjoyed it.

I had the opposite experience. Really struggled with reading it. Switched to the audiobook and enjoyed it a lot more. The voice acting really brought the characters and atmosphere to life for me and enabled me to pay more attention to what was going on. I listened to the version narrated by Robertson Dean and think he did a great job.

I think this book needs at least two passes because there's a lot of in-universe jargon to pick up and for me it really only began to fall into place towards the end half. I also asked ChatGPT to summarise each chapter for me after I'd read it - that really helped me fill in the gaps of what I'd missed or misunderstood. In addition, I had it generate me a spoiler-free glossary of all the main terminology used in the book.

You might have to slow it down to 0.75x on the audiobook so you can savor and have time to construct the visuals of the scenes in your head. For fluff business books I listen at 1.25x or even higher if it is garbage, but for very difficult but worthwhile prose like Borges I slow things down to 0.75 and enjoy and savor the brilliance of the author.

There was a fantastic soundtrack created for this audiobook in the 90s by the industrial group Black Rain. https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/neuromancer

Wow, that is absolutely phenomenal! This alone makes me want to listen to the audio book, which would be my first. Perhaps a dumb question, but are ambient tracks and/or similar fx stuff common in audio books? I'd always assumed it was simply a reading.

Many audiobooks have brief music interludes between major sections, but generally that's it, just narration.

Soundbooth Theater does exactly that with music and sound effects

https://soundbooththeater.com/

Woah, thank you so much for posting this. What an atmosphere.

Previously:

William Gibson reads Neuromancer, from tape to mp3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021369 - April 2017 (3 comments)

Re. the date:

- The original book was published in 1984

- This abridged audio reading seems to have been published in 1994

- This article was published in 2004

So glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about The Difference Engine. (And I don't generally dislike Sterling...this book just didn't work for me.)

I remember starting that book, but not getting far into it. It didn't click for me, either. That was a number of years ago though. Maybe I owe it a retry.

I've actually read it twice, didn't actually hate it...but I also don't remember anything about it, which is patently untrue about other Gibson books.

I may owe it a third try as well.

Same. I love Gibson's writing, I love Sterling's, but TDE remains on my bottom 5 books I've ever read. To this day if someone mentions steampunk I flee for the exits. I feel bad about this because I bought it in hardback on the book promo tour and Bruce Sterling signed it for me, we even had a chat because the bookstore wasn't busy and I told him how much I was looking forward to reading it. In my guilty subconscious he is still at the same store, waiting for a customer who promised to come back and never did. I'm sorry Bruce.

Agreed, and it’s all the more surprising because one of my favorite short stories is a collaboration between the two of them: “Red Star, Winter Orbit.” The Difference Engine just doesn’t work for me though.

Recommend the Peripheral TV series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series)

Hopefully they renew it eventually

Apparently the show for Neuromancer itself is now in production.

Yes, indeed! Apple already posted a teaser, ft. the Chatsubo:

    https://x.com/GreatDismal/status/1940130126202839445

i love that a big tech corp will bring us new Neuromancer content.

Irony isn't lost on that.

Maybe for maximum effect it should have been a Japanese company... (maybe Sony, who, IIRC, at some point in the past have required installation of proprietary software/DRM in order to play their content, snuck in a rootkit in the process too, which is itself a kind of cyberpunky thing to do I guess but I digress...)

It's been cancelled. Forever. It wasn't bad but it was deviating significantly from the book in good and less good ways. Some of the new stuff was interesting. I'm not sure where they were going with the story. It's probably a good thing that they stopped it.

This is probably something worth submitting to the Internet Archive if you’re worried about it disappearing!

That reminds me. I probably have a rough video of part of an author talk by Richard Dawkins... speaking from a church pulpit.

It was an old church, with acoustics that worked pre-electronics. At the start of the talk, Dawkins remarked, something like, being up there, he now understands why some preachers speak the way they do.

The book store would borrow the church as a venue for author talks, and it was only a funny coincidence that Dawkins's book that time was, IIRC, "The God Delusion".

(I'll have to see whether I still have it on an old computer, then contact the hosting venue, to see whether this can be preserved in a respectful way, on archive.org. Or they might already/still have a better recording.)

Oh, I have those cassettes and listened to them on a 6 hour drive a couple weeks ago.

Hearing it from start to finish, all in one go was very emmersive. I just needed a little bit of nicotine gum to stay awake through Gibson's drawling voice and U2's dub accompaniment.

The return trip was Einstein's Dreams on cassette read by Michael York. That voice is a treat.for the ears.

Years ago I was blown away to learn about this "Gibson reads Neuromancer" audio book only when I heard it sampled in a song[0] by Haujobb (the band, not the demoscene group). I recognized the words as being from Neuromancer, one of my top favorite books, but I wasn't aware of where it was from. Had to do some searching online to discover the audio was sampled from Gibson's reading of his own book. Very cool surprise! (as an aside, if you like cyberpunk-esque music, can absolutely recommend this band - check out "Solutions for a Small Planet")

[0] https://haujobb.bandcamp.com/track/penetration-fuck-the-floo... at 2m45s

There is a much higher quality version of this posted on IPFS.

https://bafybeifvyimyhbmn4ml3ewleepiaahaultucbs6nnzu6qwswld6...

I've had this sequence of quotations from various classic cyberpunk stories burned into my mind for the last 30 years. The slow zoom into the disembodied head on the cover of Neuromancer, while the visual and audio effects increase in intensity over the narration, "lines of light, ranged in the non-space of the mind" is particularly striking: https://youtu.be/VuZonQVN4uw?t=556

Was that read by Gibson himself?

TIL there is a william gibson documentary (although it looks to be missing) -- http://www.nomaps.com/

JK I found it -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIDVvhy9Z0I

A number of years ago driving late one evening an interview of his came on the radio. It might have originally been WGBH or a Canadian affiliate I can't recall, but just listening to him talk and expound on his views of the world gave the same thrill as reading Neuromancer and that same thrill of exploring the world through a phone line.

I can recommend „No Maps for These Territories” (found bootleg on YouTube) for that kind of thing.

I didn't have more problems reading Neuromancer than others, quite enjoyed it, but listening to it is not easy. The names and the random nouns that have acquired new meanings (like sprawl, chiba), are hard to parse for non-native speakers. Harder than in text, IMO.

I am currently teaching Neuromancer as the primary text for a first-year studies course on cyberspace. It is absolutely incredible re-reading that text and marveling at Gibson's vision of the future (which with science fiction is really a commentary on the now).

Nice to see direct links to MP3 files. More websites should follow that example.

I found a FLAC torrent, here's the info hash: afb177e0703e345db3a176f05f4086b81ef310d0

I didn't realize the Mountain View Library still has books on cassette tapes. Neat!

It’s mostly older stuff the Santa Clara county library has acquired over the years, along with books on CD. A lot of stuff is now on Libby/Hoopla and they even have MP3 players with just one book on them you can rent.

Planting Accelerando's.

Ayn Rand Institute will shelf Atlas en-mass to public libaries.

I've been reading Neuromancer, had it on my list for long time... But I just can't get through it. It moves slowly, the main character makes dumb choices (facepalm level), has a flat personality, sex is very male-centric and flat/unimaginative (but that is in most older scifi "here an interesting female with a loose sexual morale to spice up the story").

I stopped somewhere half way. Someone spoiled the plot so I know it should get epic at some point but I just can't get there. Am I the only one?

I mean, the main character is a washed out, aging, drug junkie has-been, of course he makes bad choices. :)

Molly is actually a fairly interesting and complex character if you follow her from Johnny Mnenmonic all the way through Neuromancer (especially the second half) and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

It's tempting to write off Case's behavior as just a realistic portrayal of a washed up addict, but thematically there's a strong and likely intentional parallel between the way he's coming apart and the way one of the main AIs in the story is coming apart. If you add in Linda Lee and the other AI, what Gibson was trying to do becomes a lot clearer. I'm intentionally being vague to avoid spoilers.

A real classic. As an author who was asked by my publisher to perform my own audiobook:

1. There is a reason 'reader of audiobooks' is a profession - it is stupid difficult. I will never do it again.

2. I loved this tape so much. It does such interesting things with its soundscape (from memory - if it actually is just Gibson reading it, then he must have embedded those memories through the sheer brilliance of his performance.

3. My fiancee is partially-sighted (I see her as an investment that will appreciate as biohacking becomes more and more prevalent) and she reads mostly by audiobook.

It's not really how I prefer to read - I get distracted too easily - but I've been appalled at the production quality of what I've overheard. While Gibson's work is a special case, an audiobook is only one dimension away from a film adaptation.

4. Literally all my millennial-Gen-Z-cusp friends who are non-readers opted for the audiobook of my book, not the book-book. Anecdata, but interesting. They would just switch Rogan or whatever out during their commute until they felt they'd listened to (what I assume as) enough of it to be socially acceptable.

5. I have no market knowledge other than that I signed my audiobook rights away to my publishers in the industry-standard way.

6. I'm sure it'd be very easy to procure data that made a case for audio fiction that was well-produced and incorporated soundscape-like elements, being incredibly commercially successful. It strikes me as a form that is ripe for innovation. And everyone loves books on tape.

7. There has been so much really interesting innovation in 'aural mood amendment' over the last decade or two. Some of it seems like pseudoscience, some of it seems legit - I wish I had sources to share. Apologies that I don't.

8. I assume someone has already built this concept - well-produced, soundscape-driven longform audio fiction - I'm not a consumer of that market well enough to know it. It'd be a really, really fun project. I'm sure it'd be very tough to get profitable, but it's almost too fun to care. This could be another reason it doesn't exist.

9. Gibson's 2003(?) novel Pattern Recognition is insanely underrated - probably not by people here - but I think the prose is better, and in a decade or two it will feel just as (if not more) prescient. It's a really, really good example of a literary classic that didn't get attention from book dweebs because it's from a 'genre' guy. If you like Neuromancer, and want to think about the next couple of decades in a similar way, you will really love it. I always thought it'd make a great double-bill with the movie Children of Men .

the best author-read audiobook I've listened to recently has been Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky[0]. He did a really good job and I would never have guessed it was the author himself. As you say, it's a very different and difficult job.

[0] https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0CMXTZZN2

Absolutely! I listened to it just a couple weeks ago - I was amazed at how good his narration was! He had various voices, accents, great pacing, etc. Tchaikovsky is as good of a voice actor as he is an author. (Actually, maybe a bit better.)

The best author narrated books, by far, are narrated by Douglas Adams. He's recorded all his books, and they're all great. There's something special hearing the words coming straight from the genius himself.

I would second Pattern Recognition. Something about it struck a chord with my similar inclination towards clothing and accessories without massive labels. Never realised it was so such a big thing that would spawn sites like cool hunting, or the current gen-z styling that tends towards all black/all white.

I love how W.G. still reads well to this day. Have so many good memories as an early teen ripping through his work as fast as I could. Enjoyed every single page.

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