I'm about half way through this book and there are two things I can't believe: 1. That I haven't read this book before, it's from 1984 and it really holds up fantastcally. 2. How much The Matrix movie stole from this book, and here I thought the first one was brilliantly original.
More than the matrix, the role playing game "Shadow Run" is lifted almost entirly from this book. I liked it alright for what it was. Good stuff. Hehe, although the part where the main character finds that his stolen 3 mega bytes of ram which he was going to sell on the black market has been stolen did make me laugh. Oh 1984 you are silly.
I don't know if the matrix stole much from Neuromancer, but one of the sequel books "Johnny Mnemonic" was made into a movie staring Keanu Reeves, coincidence? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/ Neuromancer started the cyberpunk genera in sci-fi literature, comic books, movies and animation. For that I love it as the classic. But my personal favorite of all cyberpunks is “Ghost In The Shell” by Masamune Shirow. http://www.manga.com/ghost/ghost.html
I wouldn't say Neuromancer is may favorite by any stretch (but I'm not done reading it so I guess I'll see), I was just suprised by how influential it was to the genre. Kinda like Lord of the Rings, it may not be your favorite but once you've read it, suddenly 90% of fantasy literature seems a lot less original.
You'll like the end, buffys. its got a ninja. No particular reason for that, guess Gibson just wanted to write about a ninja. As for the LOTR comment, I couldn't get through fellowship. Tolkiens writing didn't agree with me, but upon watching the LOTR movies I nearly vomited at what I was forced to realize was the source material for the fantasy series "The Wheel of Time" I invested a lot of time in that series, and to discover that it just lifts so much strait out of LOTR, not just parallels it, but outright copies it with names changed to protect the innocent... oh boy, I don’t know if I can go on with it
Yes, exactly how I felt reading neuromancer. I read the wheel of time series after lord of the rings so I went into the series knowing, that makes it a bit less painful. On another note, is it just me or did book 10 of WOT chew ass? I've never read a 700+ page book that added NOTHING to the story before. And then jordan has the balls to release a prequel, essentially another book full of stuff we already know. I'm officially pissed at him now and just hope he finishes the series before 2150.
Hahaha, Book 10 was the most recent, right? I know, the previous book had the single most important event in the series to date *spoiler* The cleansing of the taint */spoiler* In the subsequent book you are expecting all hell to break loose, but instead you get some folks sitting around sipping tea and wondering why their warder bonds with male channelers seem a little different. I wanted to tear my eyes out, not a single plot thread was advanced. Jordan claims he has plans for what he is going to write after WoT, but that has to be a bald faced lie. He is going to ride this series till we wont take it any more. And being scifi/fantacy fans, that’s going to take a bit.
A brilliant first novel. Wait 'till you read "Mona Lisa Overdrive". P.S.: IMHO, the greatest 'source' of material for "The Matrix" would be R. Descartes' "Meditations" (cf. 'evil deceiver), quickly followed by H. Putnam's "Brain In A Vat". Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Hey, for lifting LOTR, "the sword of Shannarra" takes the biscuit, its essentially LOTR for small children. Mr Brooks deserves great derision for writing it, and its myriad sequals.
I only made it to "Lord of Chaos" in WOT; I am usually pretty good at keeping track of plot points, but I remember somewhere in Lord of Chaos they started talking about Davram Bashere, and all I could think was "Isn't that the doctor from Deep Space 9?" I know if I read the Coles notes they would say that Davram Bashere was Faile's father or some crap. I know that he was supposed to march all around with his big army and generally be all marchy and stuff. I know that it was supposed to represent a condensation of the character constellation... but reading his name sort of catalyzed my realization that I was no longer bothering to remember where the story was going because I didn't care. Also, the "balefire" kind of lost its sting when it turned out that, rather than erasing you from space and time, it just kind of consigned you to "balefire heck" wherefrom the Lord of Lame Nightmares could easily recover your ass. The fact that Baal'Zamon's powers included "reverse reverse causality" really raped the hell out of the metaphysics in this series. I preferred the Elric saga - but you have to read it twice. First read: Dolorous tale of suffering. Second read: Saga of Comedy! Elric: The Dead Gods' Book... the wisdom of the ages crumbled to dust! Have we come all this way for nothing!?!? Moonglum: No... we can sell the cover for CASH! Elric: ... Moonglum: C'mon old chum! Beer and whores! Do I see a little smile there? Elric: ... Moonglum: Whoooooooooooores... Elric: Okay fine. Where's my drugs?
what is the elric saga? it sounds like discworld or something. is it one of those rare fantasy/comedies?
It's one of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champions serieses. Whether or not it was intended to be a comedy is not clear to me; it would be good to remember at this point that I though God Emperor of Dune was also pretty funny. Duncan: "How many Duncan Idahos have there been?" The Emperor: "Eighty-seven." Duncan: "WHAT!?" The Emperor: "That answer always upsets you. Duncan number sixty-five was particularly concerned, I recall." Duncan: "But... this totally destroys my individuality!" The Emperor: "Yes, the other Duncans said that too."
When I read Neuromancer back in '98, I had in had with it a book on Neural Networking. It was weird I suppose to have such a mixture of books since the "Introduction to Neural Networks" (Igor Aleksander & Helen Morton, 1989) covered the at time understanding of where artificial intelligence design was going for pattern matching visual inputs etc. Gibson has written (and continues to write) many novels that interlink as the "Sprawl Series". Such books include "Burning Chrome" which contains such short stories as the original "Johnny Mnemonic" and "New Rose Hotel" (which was also made into a film), Mona Lisa Overdrive has been mentioned but there is also "Count Zero". More recent works include "Idoru" and "all tomorrows parties". If you like Gibsons work, you might be interested in some of the works by co-authors like Bruce Sterling. ("The Difference Engine" was done by Him and Gibson) Sterling covers the same genere and the authors do tend to work towards generating a one universe effect which has generated the cyberpunk scene. A good site for Gibson related material can be found here: http://www.antonraubenweiss.com/gibson/ Fingers crossed they actually make a film of "Neuromancer" thats seen to be original rather than a rip off of everything thats already ripped it off.
I once heard that Sylvester Stallone had bought the screen rights for Neuromancer, and had a screenplay. This address: www.scriptsecrets.net/library/scriptnr.htm claims to have a copy, but I can't get to the site. This: http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/neuromancer.txt Is another copy. Can't tell if it's real, but it does match the hideous quality of other screenplays Gibson's written, such as Johnny Mnemonic and X-Files/Killswitch.
http://www.antonraubenweiss.com/gibson/gibson0.html has some information. It's going to take forever to finish it, and it will be nothing compared to the book. The script starts with an abduction... Neuromancer doesn't start with an abduction...!? It can only go downhill from there Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I was fascinated by Wintermute. There are a few pages in the book that seemed to link God with AI. I...am...Wintermute. Yes! Edit: search the net for: the first church of Wintermute... a warning to not read the book too many times Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
it's weird I really really like Neuromancer, but I can't finish it! have read from the start 3 times and every time I get some brain seizures I feel totally shit and torn apart from within. have to meditate for days to get myself back weird, because I'm all into cyberpunk and I feel one with the subculture but that book plays some subconscoious games on me I'll try to read it smtime for the 4th time. I always "pass out" smtime when they're on that high orbit colony
Avatar: cyberpunk is toast as a subculture and has been for years. The original thesis of the movement - that technology and human nature were going to collide, and ultimately alienate people from the world - has long since been lost to the genre. (To see this theme, read "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" - http://lib.ru/GIBSON/frag_rose.txt - the story I believe most compactly illustrates this idea.) Cyberpunk got mainstreamed, and it got used, and by the time the Johnny Mnemonic movie came out (1995 - almost 10 years ago), there was no one left to even cry about it. I remember, a couple of years before, I laughed - I saw an interview with some author (Keith Laumer? unsure) who said that cyberpunk was dead, and that the only choice left about it was what music to play at the funeral. "Pshaw," I thought. "Cyberpunk still has years left in it." When Johnny Mnemonic came out all that changed. The story changed from a bare-bones story about survival to a typical Hollywood crap flick about saving the world from a dread disease. For the record, the original Johnny did not give a crap about the loss of his childhood memories. That's why I gotta laugh about Shadowrun - a good game on its own merits, but cyberpunk? Not... so much. Not any more than a spaghetti western or a Conan movie, anyway.
