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.
