Skip to main content

Neuromancer

Image
By
by William Gibson

ISBN: 0006480411

I read this book as it was recommended to me by a friend as a classic. I’m sure it was revolutionary in its time, but I didn't enjoy it. I found it very difficult to follow. It was suggested to me that I should sit down and try and read it all in a couple of sittings. It would probably have made more sense if I had and I may try and do that in the future.

I just didn’t warm to the main character, Case. However I don’t think you’re meant to. All the drugs references did nothing for me either. Maybe I didn’t play hard enough in my youth.  I also think software and virtual reality has come on too far for what was in the book to seem magical and new.

Unless I re-read Neuromancer and enjoy it, I won’t be reading any more William Gibson.

Comments

  1. Chris4 January 2013 at 11:46

    Boo hisss, well If you did not get on with this novel then all his other works are written in the same manner. I think part of the problem is a lot of time has passed maybe. I know what you mean about software and virtual reality but was written when these things were being invented so the terminology and ideas are off.

    I do remember that it took me several readings to get the most out of the novel, but thats the way gibson writes.

    I think an another example here could be Johnny Mnemonic http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/, the short story is good. The implementation in film is bad or at least a guilty pleasure. So interpretation is really king.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anthony Williams15 January 2013 at 18:26

    I read Neuromancer last year, and thoroughly enjoyed it; I'm looking forward to reading his other books when I get a chance.

    I don't think you have to have "played hard" to empathise with Case. I felt like I understood where he was coming from, and wanted him to be OK.

    I actually found that since I read it, a lot of references to things in the computer/hacker/scifi world made a bit more sense --- this book is where many of the ideas and terminology came from.

    I recommend you take another look.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I, Robot

By
The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...
1 comment
Read more

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more