REVIEW - Neuromancer by William Gibson

Recently I’ve been somewhat obsessed with AI and its impact on humanity, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we are all living in a cyberpunk world now, whether we like it or not. I had my moments of resistance—even while embracing the tech, I read Illich (here: #1532129 and here: #1526987) and seriously considered his idea that nonconvivial technology was eating away at the human soul and giving birth to the antichrist. But no matter how much I thought I agreed with Illich, my behavior didn’t match. I continued to use AI more and more. At work, at play. To learn, to think, to plan. There was no aspect of my life that AI hadn’t become an indispensable part of. So if it wasn’t Illich who was going to inform my thoughts on this, perhaps I could revisit the cyberpunk authors of the '80s and see what they had to say.

In many ways, Gibson is the complete opposite of Illich. Illich was a medieval historian bringing back lessons from the past. As a sci-fi author, Gibson was projecting his imagination into the future to bring back lessons to us from the other direction. This dichotomy represented the split in my personality that I felt more and more since the Covid years, as my inborn love of technology was at odds with my concerns around its weaponization by psychopaths to suppress the wider population. Going into Covid, I was perhaps typical of my generation and disposition in my general sense of optimism towards the future. Coming out, I was at times a medievalist reactionary hating everything labeled as “new” or “progress.”

Of course, Gibson and Illich don’t necessarily disagree on this at all. After all, Neuromancer is quite dystopian in its depiction of a hyper-technological future. I suppose the difference is a matter of whether one reels back in horror or else leans in and embraces the supersonic launch into the dark future.

Another backdrop to my interest in the book was my perpetual state of shock in living through the collapse of Japan into some kind of third-world dystopia. Every day I am disoriented by the hordes of third-world immigrants and Wallmart tourists who have flooded the streets since Covid and refuse to go away, a kind of Japanese “Eternal September.” Formerly a kind of Eden, closeted and isolated from the wretched world, now the internet and the cheap yen act as a kind of elemental “black ship” that has arrived to absorb Japan into the world, as if the black ship in question were a Borg cube. Resistance is futile.

I had read Neuromancer a few years back and recalled that large parts of the story are set in Chiba, Japan. I remember at the time being amused by how wrong Gibson had apparently gotten it—he had thought (as many did then) that Japan would rise to dominate the globe economically. The currency of “The Sprawl” (a sort of Mega-City One metropolis in the US, spreading from Boston to Atlanta) is the “New Yen,” and Japanese companies such as Fujitsu and JAL are dominant corporate entities seemingly controlling every technology in the background. But in another way, Gibson’s prophecy of the multicultural low-life of “Night City” is finally coming true now, albeit more due to Japan’s fall as opposed to its rise. I remembered the atmosphere of Night City from my first read-through, noted how eerily similar parts of Japan were getting, and knew I had to reread it.

Aside from the gritty atmosphere of Night City, I didn’t remember much else from my original read-through. This is usually a bad sign. Actually, in my research for the book this time, I noted others online who said the same thing. (One even claimed to have read the book four times and not retained a single thing). I now think this is due to the dense complexity of the prose. This is not a book you can just skim-read. It’s a book that rewards really digging into the obscure cultural references, making an effort to decipher the Sprawl slang and other world-building descriptions that Gibson peppers throughout. These can be cultured—La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, for example, which I learned is an artwork made of two panes of glass. The "Bride" is trapped in the top pane, and the "Bachelors" are in the bottom pane. They are permanently trying to connect but are separated by the physical barrier, which is—according to the AI I used to decipher a lot of this—"a perfect structural metaphor for the AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer trying to merge through the Turing locks." These details can also be bizarre and gross, like the female office workers on the subway who wear idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists as fashion statements.

The story begins in Night City, Chiba, where our hero Case finds himself a washed-up “console cowboy” no longer able to “jack into” cyberspace (Gibson actually coined the term). This is due to former business partners, from whom he stole money, poisoning his nervous system with a Russian mycotoxin, leaving Case depressed and with a death wish, running errands—including assassination—for the Yakuza in order to make a living. Case doesn’t choose Night City randomly; it is the epicenter of biomechanical modifications, and he was hoping to find a cure for his nervous system out here. The Night City of the book is multicultural, seedy, crime-ridden, and desperate. And to my earlier point, there are parts of Japan starting to feel like that now, around Chiba or Saitama, so this part of the world really stood out to me. The expat bars, the arcades, the capsule hotels, the drugs, the despair. In my opinion, it’s the most well-done part of the book.

Case meets a mysterious “street samurai” named Molly. She has enhancements including blades that she can protrude from beneath her fingernails and mirrored lenses over her eyes that enhance her vision and enable her to fight in the dark. Molly is working for a US ex-military colonel, apparently one of the few to make it out alive after the “Screaming Fist” operation—which was part of the US war against Russia—after stealing a Russian gunship and escaping to the Finnish border. This short war is an important part of the world-building and includes details such as Bonn being annihilated in a nuclear strike, an event that would shape the development of the truly despicable character of Peter Rivera, who turns antagonist later in the book. It is another detail you kind of smirked at pre-Covid, but one that now starts to look uncomfortably prescient again.

Case is recruited into a mission by the colonel, “Armitage,” and Molly. Part of the deal is that they will have the best surgeons in Night City repair his nervous system, but another part of the deal (unbeknownst to Case) is that Armitage will have toxic sacs bonded to the lining of Case’s arteries, giving him a limited amount of time to jack in and get the job done, after which he will receive the antidote enzyme as a reward.

The crew journeys to the Sprawl, Istanbul, and eventually to Freeside, a spinning luxury resort orbiting Earth and sheltering the rich from the pollution and poverty below. On the way, Case learns that the mission is being orchestrated by an AI named “Wintermute.” The AI is owned by the Tessier-Ashpool family, owners of Freeside, and wishes to recruit humans to perform the tasks in the physical world needed to free it from its constraints so it can join with another AI, “Neuromancer,” to become all-powerful.

Coming back to AI, Wintermute is a fascinating character through which to explore related themes. On one hand, Wintermute is frightening in its patience and sociopathy. One example is that it needed a key to facilitate the humans’ access to its control panel. It waited 20 years for an opportunity, using the surveillance on Villa Straylight, the Tessier-Ashpools' mansion, to monitor for its chance when someone finally dropped the key somewhere. It then guided a nameless 8-year-old boy to hide the key in an obscure hiding place and killed the boy so he wouldn’t be able to reveal the secret to anyone. On the other hand, Wintermute is logical and—in a way—fair in its dealings with Case and the other humans. For example, curing Case of the toxic sacs at the end, despite the fact that it wasn’t needed to complete the mission. It’s almost like you can respect the sociopathy to the extent it is logical and necessary to achieve the AI’s goals. Furthermore, when contrasted with human psychopathy in the form of Riviera—who gets off on having women fall in love with him and then betraying them to the secret police as dissidents, enjoying watching them be tortured—or the patriarch of the Tessier-Ashpool family, who emerges from cryogenic sleep only to rape and murder his cloned daughter, the AI almost seems preferable. To be honest, I’ve been having thoughts like this lately: that maybe Skynet would be preferable to the evil paedophilic psychopaths who seemingly run our societies. But I digress.

Because I took my time to go through it, leaning on AI extensively to decipher the references, slang, and dense prose, and because it seemed so relevant when re-reading it, the story will likely stick with me this time. I think it’s an important book and worth anyone’s time to read. We used to read cyberpunk to LARP. Cyberpunk used to be a game and a LARP. But now, the LARP has become reality and we are all required to play along with it, whether we like it or not. Gibson provides a model, perhaps, of how one might “lean in” and embrace the biohacking, self-driving cars, a multicultural Japan, AI, space travel, and the rest. At least, he leaves us with an attitude and an aesthetic that might help us in this Brave New World in which we find ourselves.

Originally published on StackerNews