Judith Piccione

Book Report #1

Neuromancer by William Gibson

The novel Neuromancer by William Gibson is thought to be “the Bible of Cyberpunk” and has helped pioneer the Cyberpunk Literature literary movement (The Cyberpunk Project).  This genre, a division of Science Fiction, has blossomed since Neuromancer’s first publishing in 1984.  The term “cyberpunk” comes from this sector of literature’s manipulation of people on the periphery of a culture (“punks”) in highly technological eras.  In this genre, technology reigns supreme and dominates all.  Those beneath these vastly technological systems feel powerless, mainly in the absolute darkness that powerlessness creates.  In this darkness comes a small light in the form of Neuromancer’s main character.

The novel opens with the line, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a deal channel” (3).  This first line of the story sounds bleak.  It provides us with a foreshadowing of what is in store for our characters.  Case, the so-called hero of the story, begins his portion of the tale in the Chatsubo, “a bar for professional expatriates” (3).  This bar is smack-dab in the middle of a dark world run by drugs and hustlers.  It is a world in an “age of affordable beauty” where ugliness is scoffed because beauty is just one procedure away (3).  Readers get an early understanding, in just the first few pages, that Case is an addicted, lost soul in a technology-controlled world.  

    The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.  All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy.  Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there (5).

Here in the opening pages of the novel, Gibson reveals the conflict at the heart of this literary work.  Case is a wronged, washed-up console cowboy that longs to vindicate his past and return to his former glory.  After a botched business decision, Case was exiled from the computer-centered world he had always known for trying to get ahead of his wealthy thief employers, “because—still smiling—they were going to make sure he never worked again.  They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin” (6).  It is this decision at the very core of the novel that allows for the classic conflict of the haves vs. the have-nots to persist.  However damaged by his past pursuits, Case, our “punk” hero, continues his quest to regain his former status.

Soon, the reader is introduced to Molly, an artificially-enhanced “razorgirl” employed by Armitage, who is sent to collect Case and deliver him; “One live body, brains still somewhat intact” (25).  He was brought to Armitage who, like Inspector Gadget’s mysterious Dr. Claw, ominously lays it all out for Case.  He promises to correct Case’s neural damage if Case agrees to offer his services as a hacker.  However fantastic this sounds for Case and his plight, Armitage is genius enough to ensure Case’s cooperation in this ultimate quest.  Armitage has the clinic commissioned to fix Case implant mycotoxin sacs in his head for which he holds the remedy:

You have time to do what I’m hiring you for, Case, but that’s all.  Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs.  Then you’ll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you’re back where we found you.  So you see, Case, you need us.  You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter (46).

Poor, unfortunate Case is unable to deny the temptation of the virtual world and his former, more glorious life, so he soon finds himself entangled in a global plot to hack into and unite the world’s largest artificial intelligence systems, Wintermute and Neuromancer; no easy task.  All too soon, Case and Molly find that Armitage himself is a figment of the virtual world, a construct or hologram.   He was created by the super AI entity, Wintermute, after government Special Forces failed to keep biological testing and technological developments of soldiers under wraps.  Case then enters a construct known as cyberspace, equipped with his new neural system.  It is at this point that the lines between reality and the matrix become quite fuzzy.  Case is positioned in a situation where he must constantly flip between uniting the twin AI’s and Molly’s reality inside the matrix, the first mission before attacking their ultimate goal. 

The continuous struggle of switching back and forth between reality and cyberspace begins to move toward culmination when Case and Molly initiate their assignment to get to the center of the Tessier-Ashpool global creation.  Molly enters cyberspace alone and can only be accessed by Case through cyberspace.  Case has the ability to flip between the real world and cyberspace.  He can feel what Molly feels and hear what she says but cannot communicate with her beyond that.  It appears as though Case is nearing success.  Armitage, on the other hand, begins to lose ground and control when Case nears Lady 3Jane Marie-France, the clone monarch of the Tessier-Ashpool Corporation.  Armitage begins to get nervous and doubt the mission, so he hires a conman to ultimately stop Molly and Case as they near the password, held by Lady 3Jane Marie-France, which could help them reach their goal.

The climax of the story is where the lines between real life and virtual reality become almost unrecognizable for readers.  It seems as if this is exactly what Gibson was going for when helping to create the cyberpunk literature genre.  According to the Cyberpunk Project Website, “cyberpunk really is The Undefinable” (1996).  The culmination of this novel offers no clear resolution to any of the characters or machines.  Each of the involved parties is static.  Case emerges with a large bank account, enough to return to his original state.  Wintermute, as the Finn, tells case that “things aren’t different.  Things are things” in true cyberpunk fashion (259).  The creation of a super-AI was destined to happen:

 Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside.  Neuromancer was personality.  Neuromancer was immortality.  Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer (259). 

However destined the union was, the ending also failed to provide readers with any clues as to the future of any of the characters.   This story concludes with Case reverting back to his old ways.  He has completed his mission and does not seem to have gained anything other than a sum of money.  He wanted to regain the status as an ace-hacker that he once had, but as a person, has he actually gained anything in the course of events?  Case still seems alone and marginalized; a true testament to the effects of technology and the very aura of the cyberpunk literary genre.

Sources

Gibson, William (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. ISBN 0-00-648041-1.

The Cyberpunk Project.  1994.  7 July 2008  http://project.cyberpunk.ru/