NEUROMANCER by William Gibson

Read by Robertson Dean

       I prefer situations to plans. 4:26:26    

This book required two listenings for me; not that it is that difficult a book, just that I needed two tries to get myself plugged in to the literary and media gestalt that is audiobook listening. On the first pass I was evaluating it only on the level of the cool lingo and techno-noir dialog. Gibson’s terminology is so ripe that I wish I had a glossary to help me remember it all. If I could talk like his characters do I might even be cool. This is the way I first appraised it reading the paperback version years ago, and this is the only memory I had about the book. For me this book was seen as a sort of prose poem, the words were the thing. I just let them wash over my mind like a babbling brook over a moss covered rock. I never concerned myself with the story. It is the same way I engage with the movie Blade Runner: the visuals and the milieu are so convincing that I don’t mind that the story is thin. This was a mistake, for as cool as Gibson’s lingo is there is a story here. And, as I am intent on listening to the two sequels immediately after this, COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE, maybe, I thought, paying attention to what is going on in the first novel will enhance my enjoyment of the other books in the Sprawl series.

It helps me to know that this is William Gibson’s first book. That explains some of the passages where the action is hard to follow and the characters not fully realized. It does not help me to understand how Gibson could conjure up such a holographic vision of the future. I always hate it when outsiders, looking into the realm of Science Fiction, keep a scorecard on the prognostications made by various writers, as if that was the purpose of writing SF: to predict the future. Sure Gibson manages to foresee the coming internet computer age. It was predictable; many others have done the same. No, Gibson’s contribution is in melding the obvious computer age with cool techno-crime operators and the noir street sub-culture, and giving the resulting mélange a vocabulary that at once defines the culture and allows no room to question its validity. Gibson’s cyber-land has many of the technological advances we are now experiencing, but our world is nothing like the Sprawl. In NEUROMANCER we are presented with the gritty underbelly of the clean-room silicon-enabled technological culture that sometimes seems indistinguishable from magic. The Sprawl is populated with the criminal element that naturally would opportunistically arise to take advantage of the weak links in the system. Organized crime is fascinating if for nothing else its ability to capitalize on the weakness in any system. That, I believe, is Gibson’s great contribution to SF. He has extrapolated the advances technology would make like any good SF writer, then layered that future with a culture that is nothing like the modern actual cyber-culture, but one that seems far more interesting and strange while all the while maintaining a sense of inevitability, almost as if it were a sort of alternate parallel universe. If this is his first book, let’s discover how much clearer his vision has improved in his subsequent works.

The main reason I decided to listen to NEUROMANCER is that the two sequels are narrated by one of my favorites, Jonathan Davis and I wanted to review the first before tackling the others, having read it nearly twenty-five years ago. Robertson Dean’s reading of NEUROMANCER is conducive to appreciating the beautiful cyber-space prose in this novel. He has a wonderful somnambulistic voice; deeply intoned and well articulated, but with scant variation between the different characters. The female characters are particularly hard to make out sometimes. When this happens I know that I have not managed to fully see through the narrator and get inside the text. That is another reason I first approached this book on only the word level. His is not the most emotional rendering, but then the emotions of the book are below the surface level as well, so it is appropriate. On the second listening I decided to pay closer attention and extract all that I could from Dean’s voice. I still found myself drifting away from the plot unless I was able to focus on the story. But I did enjoy the second pass more than the first. Robertson Dean reminds me of another similar narrator, John Lee, who has a voice that I find so soothing that I tend to tune out the actual words and need to make an extra effort to stay tuned into the story. This audiobook can be experienced on purely the word level, but do strive to stay engaged to the plot; there’s a story in there somewhere.

This presentation features an introduction by William Gibson written in 2004, and an excellent afterward titled “Some Dark Holler” by Jack Womack. Both help give historical context to this very influential novel.