Quote:
Originally Posted by Artisan
Disclaimer - the following is the text of my amazon.com and bn.com reviews for this book.
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The book I was reading came to an end more quickly than I'd anticipated, and I found myself sitting in the airport, searching desperately for something to read. As a big fan of the sci-fi, futuristic genre, I read the myriad rave reviews for Neuromancer and bought it on the spot.
Being captive on a plane for about 3.5 hours, I got through a good portion of the book, but in the coming days, and then weeks, I discovered that I was forcing myself to continue reading (sometimes a page at a time, one or two pages per day), until over a month later, I finally finished.
Now this is a bad sign, when you finish reading a book and your first thought is "finally!" rather than "wow!"
Ultimately, I think the book is plagued by three major problems:
1. The "action" takes a VERY long time to get underway. The entire beginning of the book is dedicated to a back-story that is neither interesting or particularly relevant to rest of the story.
2. The author seems overly preoccupied with describing every miniscule detail of every environment and every character, almost entirely without purpose other than to impress the reader. For instance, instead of describing an office as sparsely decorated, with a few colourful adjectives, the description consists of paragraphs minutiae about the texture on the walls and floors and desk and the things on the desk and the flickering lighting the creak in the door and the smell and the guy's face and his mannerisms and what the main character thinks of him and then some longwinded back-story about the guy that we've just meet and ... I found myself constantly thinking "ENOUGH ALREADY, JUST TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!" I'd say at least 70 percent of this book is descriptions that I could have done without.
3. The only character even mildly compelling is a tertiary character who's appearances don't seem to serve the story at all. I had no interest in the affairs of any of these people.
To put it succinctly, I was pretty much just reading to find out what happens at the end. In that regard, I was again let down.
I am disappointed that I was disappointed by this book, considering all of the critical acclaim. I really wanted to like it. I tried.
I guess in the end I still don't really know what the "Sprawl" is, and sadly, that's fine by me.
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So I see by the reviews and mentions here that I'm in the minority - so, is it something that I'm just not getting or are there others that agree with my review?
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You're not getting it. #2 is exactly why it's a great novel.
It's not unlike Chandler's first few Marlowe novels. They don't make a lick of sense, because he cobbled together several unrelated short stories, combing the plots into an incoherent mess.
But it's the way he wrote that that is what counts. He basically fleshed out every scene and description.
Gibson is the same with Neuromancer. He vividly created and described a very (at the time) believable glimpse of the near future, because of his descriptions.
And indeed, part of the whole cyberpunk ethos was "style before substance"