Filed under: book, human, technology | Tags: cyberpunk, ghosts, neuromancer, william gibson
Neuromancer is one of the few books I can think of that manages to blend such a wide variety of styles and themes together so successfully. Drawing on or recalling anything from Blade Runner to the dirty underbelly noir of Raymond Chandler. Frankly, the book is kind of haunting.
Gibson is entirely graceful about the way he pieces his work together, but I found it particularly impressive the way he manages to balance the technology and the humanity in the novel. This does not mean that there is not an obvious fascination with technology, but he does avoid writing a fetish piece for the electronic, or a techno-porn. This is also not to say that there aren’t some seriously pyschosexually charged bits, but that his explorations of technology and humanity never feel cheap.
There are some especially gorgeous and lonely scenes that touch on the inter-relationship of death and technology, or the way that far from only redefining our waking lives, the technology we create begins to redefine their context, being our birth and death. So it seems that Neuromancer is becoming especially salient now that we are gaining control over the engineering of our next generation, and even more so since we are now at some risk of prolonging a semblance of self-aware life indefinitely.
He explores in a very evocative manner the way we have begun to haunt our own technology. The dead in the story live on in simulation and when we meet these characters, we are forced to ask how they are any different to us (or more importantly, themselves) than they used to be. This elegantly gets to the center of a very important issue regarding where the human ends and the technological begins. This serves the narrative, as well, as one of the greatest reasons Gibsons writing resonates with such depth is because he writes people’s ghosts into his machines, which makes a pretty powerful statement about technology all by itself.
Basically, Neuromancer has probably started to read less like a brave new world in science fiction and more like a simple, not so outlandish anymore suggestion of where we might be headed. When the imaginations of our most gifted writers are hardly (if any) stranger than what we are actually capable of, we have officially reached a strange new epoch.
Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that contains every vowel. Bök defines the word as meaning “beautiful thinking”. This book is a marvel of constraint. Its wonderful, beautiful, surprising, and just pretty amazing in general. I would link to the Amazon page for this book, but it turns out that Coach House Books has actually posted the entirety of the book on their website.
The book is technically a lipogram, or a work in which a letter or group of letters are missing, forming a constraint game for the author. Christian Bök has done this by eliminating all but one vowel from each chapter. Its really pretty amazing how far he is willing to go with the restraint, as he has extra rules that each chapter must follow.
All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord, and tumulus.) The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
Essentially, he has written a pretty astounding little book. If I remember right, it took him 7 years to put together, but can easily be read in an afternoon. The chapters begin to take on a character of their own. What starts as an impressive genre exercise also reveals itself as a thoughtful examination of the English language. Reading it might teach you a thing or two.
Some precedents, for those interested, are Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, in which he uses an alliterative device allowing in the first chapter for only words that begin with “A”, for the second both “A” and “B”, and so on and so forth. A Void by George Perec avoids the use of the letter “e” for the entirety of the novel. This is the most common letter in both French and English, so the translation is perhaps more of a work of constraint than the original was.
These exercises are all born out of the Oulipo school, which I will most likely talk about a great deal, these authors being one of my chief interests. More on that later.
