Cheryl Meany

Book Report #1

Neuromancer by William Gibson

    Neuromancer is considered to be “the Bible of Cyberpunk” (The Cyberpunk Project) and helped to create a new literary movement called Cyberpunk Literature. This genre is a subset of Science Fiction and has gained in status since Neuromancer’s publishing in 1984. The term cyberpunk derives from its handling of marginalized peoples (the quintessential “punk”) in an era of global technological systems. These systems dominate the world landscape and control all aspects of the lives of those that live within them. This place where those living on the fringe of a technologically controlled and enhanced world meet the “system” in control is where the unlikely hero of Neuromancer originates.

    This novel opens in an underground world of its own, Night City in Chiba. Case, our hero of sorts, begins his story in a run-down bar in the middle of world controlled by drugs and hustlers. The reader comes to understand early on in the novel that Case is a man who lost his place in this new cyber-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 or 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).

    There in the opening pages of the novel, Gibson reveals the conflict at the heart of the whole work. Case is a man who has been wronged and desires vindication. He was tossed out of the cyberworld he had always known because he was trying to get ahead. At the very center of this novel lies the eternal, archetypal conflict of the haves vs. the have-nots. Case is a man who spent his prior life as a console cowboy, working for a corporation in cyberspace. His ambitions led him to steal from his employers who, consequently, discovered his betrayal and made him pay. “Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because – still smiling – they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin” (6). Thus, the adventure into this Bible of Cyberpunk begins with an unlikely, marginalized hero searching to recapture his former glory as a cyberspace cowboy.

    The reader is introduced to Molly, an artificial razorgirl employed by Armitage, who is sent to deliver Case. The cards are soon laid on the table; Case agrees to hack into Sense/Net’s mainframe and steal Dixie Flatline’s construct for Armitage to utilize in his ultimate quest and, in return, Case gets to keep the antidote to the neurotoxins in his head, therefore regaining his past life. Armitage constructed a guarantee for Case’s loyalty while they were fixing Case up:

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 [containing mycotoxin]. 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).

Unable to deny the lure of cyberspace and the return to his former life, Case soon finds himself in the middle of a global plot to hack into one of the world’s preeminent artificial intelligences. Throughout their journey to unite the world’s two largest AI systems, Wintermute and Neuromancer, Case and Molly discover that Armitage himself is a construct, a hologram of sorts. He was created by Wintermute after a failed special forces mission in which the government was basically testing biological and technological developments on its soldiers. The reader, and Case himself, enter this construct known as cyberspace and the lines between reality and the cyber reality of the matrix continue to blur. Case finds himself flipping between his own involvement in the plan to unite the AIs and Molly’s reality inside the matrix. The lines continue to blur and the reader finds it difficult to identify what is part of the cyberspace construct and what is part of what is left of the human experience in this novel.

This struggle between reality and an artificial construct culminates as Case and Molly creep closer and closer to the center of the Tessier-Ashpool global creation. Molly disappears and can only be accessed by Case within the realm of cyberspace where Case can flip into her version of reality but cannot communicate with her. Armitage begins to lose control of his constructed persona and reverts back to General Corto’s personality as Case nears Lady 3Jane Marie-France, the clone monarch or the Tessier-Ashpool corporation. Riviera, the conman hired by Armitage because of his ability to project holograms, tries to kill Molly and Case as they near the password that Lady 3Jane Marie-France holds that could finally unite Wintermute and Neuromancer.

It is during this climax of the action where the lines between human reality and artificial construct truly blur for the reader. It is hard to distinguish what is happening within the construct of the AIs and the Tessier-Ashpool Corporation and what is not. This is truly central to the genre of cyberpunk literature that Gibson constructed. This novel culminates at a point where human is no longer truly human and reality is no longer truly reality. Both a constructs of a larger, global entity through the matrix in cyberspace. The ending does not serve to provide resolution to any of the characters. None of them really changed. None of them learned from their plight. Case emerges with a large bank account, large enough to clear his system of the mycotoxin and start a life in the Sprawl with a new girl and a new matrix to explore. Wintermute returns to tell Case that “things aren’t different. Things are things” (259). The creation of the AI didn’t really change anything. Wintermute and Neuromancer are still everywhere and everything, same as before. Molly disappears from Case’s life and all the other character constructs, including Riviera and Linda, appear to Case only in cyberspace. Our “hero” does end the novel back in the life construct he desired but was he truly better off? His reality becomes the construct and that is where his struggle ends. Case ends the novel hearing again, “the laugh that wasn’t laughter” (261). Another false human construct in his cyberspace reality.