/lit/ - Literature

>>16807344
It's just not that good. It's an ok idea but is poorly executed and the prose make me feel like I'm reading the work of someone who is crying out "please take my work seriously, it's not just another sci-fi novel, it has cool words, please!"
Ultimately left with a hollow work that wastes it's potential and is the book version of an art house flick
Just sad

>>16807364
Yeah I definitely agree with you. It a convoluted word salad.

Anything by Neal Stephenson

>>16807344
its a romp m8 what are you on about?
>>16807412
neal stephenson is probably a better writer but for that very reason its so much more difficult to enjoy, its not Cervantes negroe I wish he wouldn't take himself so seriously

>>16807344
I liked it. I think he took ninja mom leaving a bit too hard, but I liked it.

>>16807344
I don't think it has any literary value, but its cultural value is undoubted. It's out there with the Bible and the Koran. Why am I saying this? Because not only did it coin the term cyberspace, but in the early days of the internet every hip geek was reading it and it really opened people's minds as to what the internet can become. It's an example of fiction changing the world.

>>16807344
>I don’t get the hype.
It's hyped because it's a foundational work for its genre. However, being among the first of your kind only makes you notable, but not necessarily great. The "it was good for its time" excuse is bullshit too, since you're admitting that it hasn't survived the test of time. Though I suppose a lot of it is taste, too.

I believe that "modern art" isn't just a tax fraud scheme for richfags, but it does still have some merit. Traditional art tried to capture perfect objective beauty, something that everyone would agree is beautiful. Modern art wants to find perfect subjective beauty: it doesn't appeal to any objective canon of beauty, not even the most elitist or esoteric ones. It only appeals to the artist's own taste, and maybe yours. If you don't like it, you won't understand why someone does. But if you like it, you won't be able to articulate why for others to understand. *You* just do, and that's the essence of subjectivity over objectivity.

>>16807344
It's shit and hyped up by reddit bois.

>>16808802
Fair point anon. Fair point.

>>16808814
AOC?

Don’t you have a state to run?

>>16808827
who is this wigger?

>>16808814
It's not a foundational work for its genre, it actually is the genre. Most cyberpunk works are really just Neuromancer fan-fiction.

>"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
So the sky was blue? What a hack

>>16809215
have you ever seen a dead channel? it's not blue, it's most grey but it may have some sprinkles of color here and there. It's actually a clever simile that introduces the theme of technology in the first line of the novel and describes the strange cyberpunk world with skies blackened by pollution and neon-lights reflected on them from all the advertising.

>>16809260
no, it's blue. Blue is the industry standard. Bit tryhard to pad the first sentence out like that.

>>16809280
>takes picture of a flatscreen tv

Yo do know that this book was written when TVs looked like pic rel, zoomie, right?
We had TVs like this when I was growing up in postsoviet romania and I can say that dead channels were not blue. Maybe they are now, but not back then.

>>16809260
>with skies blackened by pollution
Exactly! Static is caused by random electromagnetic noise being picked up by the TV antenna. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_(video)
All the more true nowadays, since with the Internet of Shit every device has to be connected to wi-fi.

>>16809280
t. zoomer
>People arguing if he means the blue digital are way off, since that literally didn't exist. Then there was the TV when he was a kid, where it wouldn't necessarily have been static, but just a weird glowing grey when a station was beginning or ending it's broadcast.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/4hjmji/the_sky_above_the_port_was_the_color_of/d2ql0y9/
Go ahead, say it doesn't count because it's from R*ddit.

>>16809359
>Go ahead, say it doesn't count because it's from R*ddit.
It doesnt count, its from reddit (where you are also from)

>>16809359
>>16809380
>>16809280
still, we can all agree that it wasn't the modern digital blue.

>>16809404
>the modern digital blue
I've actually never seen a digital TV turn blue when it's on a dead channel. The screen goes solid black, and then it says "poor or no signal" in a gray pop-up, and maybe asks if you want to delete that channel. If anything, maybe computer monitors or projectors turned blue when they were turned on but had no signal, but I'm not too sure. Since I'm in a PAL region, maybe it's a NTSC thing? Though it would seem weird to use two different colors for dead channels for different regions.

>>16809358
cringe

>>16808814
>The "it was good for its time" excuse is bullshit too, since you're admitting that it hasn't survived the test of time.
What the hell is this supposed to mean? Good in what sense? That the main criticism by some is that its depiction of the future wasn't accurate? That the internet is not like it's described in the book, or that we carry smartphones and not cumbersome cyberdecks? That there are no rastaman hauling cargo through space?
Anyone thinking a book can "feel dated" is a braindead faggot.

What makes Neuromancer good? It sets a pretty unique tone and aesthetic through the whole book, combining the barbituric like dazed flow of the Beats to the secretive narrative of hard boiled mysteries. It's a drug dream. The characters all act like drug fiends. They converse with each other but they're hardly communicating. They can't connect. Maybe it is the drugs, maybe it's the disjoined society of a post State community. In the sequels, the life of everyday people suggests cliques, groups to belong to, to be exploited by individuals or corporations. Without skills, you don't exist.
So that's Chase. A guy who lost "it". And he's surrounded, by not-chance, by a gang on the brink of losing "it" as well.
This aspect is timeless, but it appeals quite well to our decadent, missionless and fragmented world.
The prose in Neuromancer fits the tone perfectly. It's the most polished of the three books in the Sprawl series. It's super dense and concise and if you listen to Gibson reading Neuromancer, I swear everything will make sense. That technobabble, the brand names? I would argue it's defined as the quirks of that imagined technocracy's speech. It's like the French in Tolstoy. Even in our own days, a similar shitty language has seeped in, taking the space of words and abstract adjectives with buzzwords, acronyms, brands, specific corporate-derived or -mandated shit nobody will remember in 10 years, because the world is in a craze to coin new memewords.
At least Neuromancer attempts to infuse or attach a feeling to this drone. "[The sky] as the color of a TV set to a dead channel" is an awfully cheap simile, but it's self serving. It's the way that narrator and those characters would perceive it. It resembles our own speech. "Haha, it's just like that GIF of..."
The story is fairly straight forward. I won't bother in defending it. A Raymond Chandler could've written the same plot, with the exception of the flatline dreams.
Other genre writers have speculated better than Gibson about the philosophical implications of AIs, interconnectivity and hypercapitalism. Gibson condensed all that in a cohesive mess. If anything, my favorite part about Neuromancer is its style and voice. I don't care it was not prophetic. I know it's not accurate by modern standards. Who the fuck cares. Whoever reads fiction and judges it for its "life teachings" is an absolute immature moron. Better read the classics with moral tales. Maybe stick to Aesop and nonfiction.

bump

>>16807344
I liked it.

>>16809215
You guys don't have that static ants looking shit?

>>16809520
Very based post. I've always wanted to articulate my own feelings on the book properly, and this does it perfectly. Thank you anon.

Gibson is a great writer i wish this board wasn't so dismissive

Virtual Light is better

I wish he wrote more short stories. Most of them are really good.

>>16812509
I definitely agree anon

>>16809520
agree I think it has interesting concepts that are executed well in a way that isn't extremely in-your-face. The suggestion that everything is this crazed mishmash of subcultures that move in and out of existence and barely are remembered always interested me. I think that's the way the future is increasingly going. The way he describes the panther moderns always gets me. The way they have no yesterday and no future, just a forever drawn out now inevitably doomed to be slaughtered in some shootout, cultural wave or plowed under by some corporate interest.

>>16807344
The prose grated on me after a while and towards the end it was hard to picture what was happening. I kinda liked how trippy it was in some parts but there's definitely some cringe like that sex scene in the beginning.

>>16810975
me too anon

>>16807344
Such a boring book.

>>16807344
It's like Candide. It's low lit but high ideas. Monkeys biting butts. That sort of thing.

>>16807412
Filtered