I just started reading Neuromancer, and finished the first two chapters. Can someone encourage me to keep on reading? It’s just so… disorienting. Very quick scene changes, hard to follow dialogues (who is actually talking?), too much jargon (I have read up on some, to get the gist), … I just feel lost, and doubt I will enjoy it at some point.
I like various degrees of scifi, and many people recommended the book (and the ones following it). I also fought through some harder chapters in Trisolaris, Children of Memory, The Expanse books, CS Lewis‘ Space Trilogy, … but Neuromancer is on awholenother level.
Is it just me? Did anyone else have a hard time with it? Does it get better? Is it worth it?
I’m going to stray from the herd here and just say ‘stop’. It’s not a good book. It is foundational to cyber punk and we wouldn’t have movies like the matrix without it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. I’ll also give it a lot of credit for being a very well imagined future with some great settings. But the main character is unrelatable, and the supporting characters are shallow. I’ll give it a pass for being a product of its time and not call out the racism and misogyny. But it commits the worst sin of a story in that you just don’t give a shit what happens to the characters. If halfway through the story a bomb went off and the story went on with a whole new cast, you’ll be ok with that. With no connection to the characters you have no investment in the victory or concern about their defeat, so the plot just kind of happens and you feel pretty ‘meh’ about it.
I finished it. I’ll reread it again someday. Not bad for science fiction. Lol imagine reading it in 1984 when it was written.
i read it just a couple of years after it came out, it took me several reads to get into it but has become one of my favorites. That said, some of it, like the opening line, probably doesn’t make sense to younger people… “The sky above the Port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel” evoked a completely different mental image in the days before digital TVs.
Man how did the concepts of ai differ back then did you have idea or was it just space magic?
The concepts of AI have been around a long time and weren’t really any different back then. Even the fundamental technology that current AI is built on has mostly been around since like the 70s, its just the amount of data that can be used to train them is staggeringly larger, which has lead to the recent breakthroughs in capability.
100% sci fi magic, but the visuals he describes of cyberspace still are how i imagine it
If you don’t like it, don’t read it.
I personally liked it from the start, but it’s got a style that’s not easy. Also, a lot of it is very dated, so when you read about things like pocket sized VCRs it won’t make much sense.
As a 90s kid I can still relate to the dated stuff somehow. But some of it is genuinely funny 😄
In “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” the computer has gained self-awareness. It was already running all the computer operations for Luna. The hardest thing it had to do was create CGIs.
There was snail mail sent by starship in ‘Starship Troopers.’
It doesn’t get any clearer. Just read it. Just experience it. It’ll come together at some point after you finish. Stop trying to understand everything and just read!
Maybe you don’t like noir
Never tried it. The closest I came to Noir so far is playing Max Payne and watching Sin City.
