Sylphisonic wrote:Actually, it definately looks like you've spent a great deal of time thoroughly analysing Neuromancer. You offer an interesting perspective, although I'm still not really won around to the book.
I tend to think a lot about the books I read. Just the way
I'm wired...
If you don't care for the tone of the early Gibson stuff, it's not a problem with me. I wasn't attempting to win you over to the book at all; I was just discussing
why the book is written the way it is. If you just don't like Gibson's stuff, cool.
And I love Thomas Pynchon's work, but a lot of people hate his books.
And I dig Stephen Wright (
Going Native,
M-33: A Family Romance), but few people are familiar with his stuff.
And in terms of genre fiction, I wish more people knew about fine and interesting writers like Russ and Elizabeth Vonarburg and Jacqueline Harpman.
Tastes vary. Not a big thing...
Well isn't that so much more mature and brilliant of him. Poking fun at the readers... Hmm...
If I thought he was
simply making fun of readers, I'd agee with you. I hate it when authors are clever for the sake of being clever, and all their cleverness signifies nothing.
But I think Gibson's early books are looking at the downside of corporate capitalism, at least in part. Hence the "from the bottom looking up" perspective. So prostitution, drug use-- markets within the Market, the illegal or dubious uses of technology-- and criminality are important to the early works'
meaning.
I sort of agree with Elmo. It has something to do-- a lot to do-- with
noir, (Gibson mentioned Howard Hawks thrillers in several interviews), but I think his stuff's not quite as misogynistic and racist as a lot of hardboiled prose and old black-and-white thrillers were.
Non-SF literary writers such as Nelson Algren and Hubert Selby come into it, too, as both wrote about criminal underworlds, and as Gibson mentions both men as influences on his own work. And I can see the similarities in tone and intent.
I remember the arguments about Gibson's stuff in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some writers
in the genre and in fandom who hated the stuff didn't like it because-- and I think they got the point-- it was looking at the underbelly of wish-fulfillment and utopian visions and the adolescent fondness for high-tech. Others didn't like it because it wasn't using the genre to promote a particularly Left-leaning ideological stance, whether socialist or anarchist. The books took corporate capitalism, free market economics, and paranoia and pushed these things to the extreme, as a simultaneously sad and darkly humorous commentary on the present-- and on our ability to imagine the future. For some science fiction writers and fans, particularly those on the Left, the books didn't offer hope, and
that felt like a betrayal. For some on the Right, the books seemed downright politically suspect. (Notice that the United States isn't mentioned in
Neuromancer, even though part of the novel takes place in the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis...) To put this another way, some on the Left within science fiction circles viewed the works as reactionary, and some on the Right viewed them as too cynical towards capitalism and U.S. domination.
(For myself, I can see why the Left was uncomfortable with Gibson's stories, but I don't think he remotely resembles a political conservative, then or now... and I think the concerns he raises are valid.)
Others didn't agree with Gibson's points but thought the work was interesting... and responded to the work in their own writings. Other imitated Gibson, Sterling, and other "cyberpunk" authors to try and cash in. And some science fiction authors just ignored the controversy and kept doing what they'd been doing.
Gibson said a few times in early interviews that he initially thought
Neuromancer would find a cult following in France a la J. G. Ballard's older stuff, if he was lucky. The "cult" he got was a little weirder than the one he'd anticipated.
Some people who weren't self-professed science fiction fans but
liked Gibson's stuff were young counterculture types who hadn't read some of the fascistic works he mentions and so missed the irony, or who maybe just admired all the surface flash in Gibson's tales. Other people bought the books because Gibson got buzz in the mainstream media. Still others were members of, as one person put it, "the tweed coat brigade"-- literary critics who jumped on the bandwagon, but missed the way
Neuromancer plays off other science fiction novels and bits of pop culture. (There's a really wicked and funny and chilling allusion to
2001 in one character's death scene in
Neuromancer...)
Not to say that all academics who paid attention to Gibson's stuff were university hacks, or that some pretty valid critiques of Gibson's shortcomings didn't come from cool, genre-savvy academics. But a lot of the academic attention was, well, bull.
Some folks who thought Gibson was a guru or that he endorsed the sort of things portrayed in the novels got angry when he moved away from what they thought was the nihilistic or transcendent stance of his early works. (Nihilism and the desire for transcendence are so often connected...) These folks had missed the way he was making fun of nihilism and the almost religious longing that technology inspires in a lot of people-- sometimes, in subtle ways, ways Gibson was foregrounding by exaggeration-- so they were taken off-guard by some of the later works with the more likeable characters. (A lot of folks who identified with Case hated Chia... go figure.
)
I don't blame him for this. Some of the readers who liked his works-- and whose interpretations he felt uncomfortable with-- missed the layers of irony. I said, "Gibson's poking fun at a lot of science fiction fans and technophiles." He wasn't making fun of readers in the sense of "ripping them off" (and I consider that to be the one form of playing with readers that's pretty unforgivable), but he was playing with readers' expectations about works of science fiction; there's a pretty big difference between the two things. He
was criticizing the genre in his works, and some fans of the genre took it personally-- even though the books and stories provide all kinds of clues that he's tweaking and interrogating the genre. The parodic elements work best if the reader is familiar with the thing being parodied. For example, a story like Gibson's "The Gernsbeck Continuum" becomes a little deeper and funnier and more chilling if the reader knows who Hugo Gernsbeck was and what Gernsbeckian "scientifiction" was like.
Gibson's early works and the response to those works resemble the intent and reaction to Norman Spinrad's
The Iron Dream. In Spinrad's novel, Hitler moved to America and wrote a really cheesy pulp fantasy novel; in the alternate history, Hitler's book became a Hugo-winning classic. Spinrad's book has the "text" of this novel-that-could-have-been as well as an academic "afterward" about the novel-- again, from the alternate timeline. Spinrad ruthlessly skewers the "good old days" of fantasy and science fiction writing and fandom, and he indicates that a lot of older genre writing is silly
and dangerous.
Apparently, the way the alternate timeline's "classic" book by Hitler-- the novel-within-the-novel-- makes L. Ron Hubbard's early genre efforts read like great literature and the way the book's Freudian and homoerotic elements highlight the unintentional subtexts of a lot of 1920s and 1930s pulp stuff was missed by neo-Nazis, some of whom enthusiastically embraced the book.
Sort of like people who embraced what they thought was Gibson's worldview...
A lot of the science fiction fans reacted one way or another to Gibson's work when it was first appearing; arbitrary lines between "humanist" and "cyberpunk" science fiction were drawn, and some of the discussions in fandom were quite heated. (To be fair, Gibson stayed out of the fray; he didn't choose to be called a cyberpunk author, and when asked about it, he shrugged it off and described the label as a way publishers and critics play the marketing and trendspotting games.)
Tonks_kittygoth wrote:I really wanted to hate Harry Potter. I did. I read the first one, and was like, um ok, wtf this is pretty thin... but then I saw the movie and got currious and read the second book. It got a little more interesting... then the third, and I was hooked.
Maybe she puts that stuff from Taco Bell that makes you hungry for more but yeh, I ended up really enjoying them.
Not sure I've ever read a book I've wanted to hate... I figured I'd intensely dislike and be disgusted by
Mein Kampf and
The Turner Diaries, and I wasn't disappointed.
Nothing wrong with reading something that you enjoy...
The Pullman stuff is much better written with lots of orriginal ideas, though the end fell off a bit for me.
It was a bit weak, but... Hmm. I thought the ending suited the story. The only complaint I had with the books is one Pullman himself has addressed in interviews... The books could've used some balance, one or two decent Christian characters. I mean, religious folks aren't
all obsessed with trepanning kids and murdering decent people...