"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
-Neuromancer

I always knew that The Matrix had to have found it’s concepts from some book, it was too revolutionary a movie to have spawned out of nothing. And I finally found it - Neuromancer, the archetypal cyberpunk novel.

This is probably the hardest and simultaneously the most riveting sci-fi novel I’ve ever read. There is a perplexing duality in the text; some parts are vivid and visually stunning, while some others are wide open to interpretation. While you are able to follow the characters emotionally and conversationally, for the most part you are left without a hint as to how they are moving in physical space. The emotion and the feeling of the world are conveyed but the shape of it is left vague. You’re completely hooked by the plot, and at the same time left fumbling in the dark for anything concrete to base your imagination on, which makes it both a liberating and a frustrating read. Where traditional sci-fi writers spend pages upon pages showing their world to you, Gibson restrains, choosing not to add lyrics to his symphonies.

There is no preamble, very little set up, the obscure cyber terms are never explained, never defined. The matrix comes up ever so often, but it is never explicitly described, a mystical world that cannot be comprehended by people who haven’t seen it, it’s unclear if it objectively exists or is just a subjective reality concocted by it’s shared users, a feeble human rendition of the world’s data pathways, forged out of the memories of arcade games,

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

The story starts out in the kaleidoscopic Chiba city, in Japan, moves around the world through The Sprawl, through Istanbul, to the man-made space islands, all the time moving parallelly through different worlds inside the matrix. Each episode is written as a memory, myopic, without any empathy for the reader, first-person accounts of our untethered protagonists.

And all the while there is a deeper mystery unfurling in the background. New singular characters are introduced constantly throughout the book, each with a mysterious past and uncertain motives. All the characters are superhumans physically but subhumans emotionally, as if Gibson was portending our disconnected ADD generation. The bewildering pace with which the story proceeds leaves you no time to breathe and absorb all that has happened, the resolution seems just out of reach, a constant feeling of being lost in a foreign world that is being made and destroyed as you meander through it.

Books like this are the reason I love sci-fi.

Update on [2021-05-23 Sun]

I reread the Neuromancer and the second time around I was able to understand and appreciate it even more. Now that I new the overall arc of the story, I could follows Gibson’s words without getting lost. Space poetry. The original Cowboy Bebop. You could see the hidden order in the chaos, feel the grandness of his vision. There is a quality of crispness to the book, existentialness. This time I could see the complexity of its characters. Clearer even more were the philosophical questions raised by Gibson, about technology, simulations, and artificial intelligence, humans losing their humanity and machines losing their machinity.

And then I went forth and read the other two books in the Sprawl trilogy. I have never been more disappointed. In the first short book, Gibson beautifully develops the characters of Case and Molly and Wintermute and Neuromancer, but then in the remaining two books he does not manage to build even a single good character. It all seems fake and contrived, forcefully cool. Absolutely nothing is explained or attains closure. The AIs become too anthropomorphic. The characters are poor quality xeroxes of Case and Molly and the books have completely unnecessary story arcs and POVs which never amount to anything. Just some lazy writing, wanting and pretending to be grand without any content. Big waste of time.