Hacker News Reader

Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

I just started reading the Sprawl trilogy, my first Gibson novels. I find them contrived and confusing. I've talked to others about this, and so far no one has disagreed. Also, I've tried to see a reason for it to be like this, and I can't...confusing for the sake of being confusing.

They are still good books (I finished Neuromancer a few days ago) and I'd recommended them to people who are already into science fiction. Having said that, I hope you'll understand when I say that I also consider them the worst that science fiction has to offer. They aren't only inaccessible but actually off putting to anyone but a dedicated reader.

I'm not a fan of it, but Ender's Game is the exact opposite. Not great science fiction, but very accessible. Whatever your thoughts on SciFi, you'll fall in love with Ender and take a very deep interest in his story.

View on HN

I don't know if it's of any help, but I offer my own experience:

I read Neuromancer as a teenager, and it had a profoundly transformative effect on my life (probably more than any other book). It first introduced me to the idea that a person like a hacker existed. That it was a viable thing to become. I may have discovered this at a later time on my own, but I'll never know.

I was so enraptured by the ideas contained in it, that I was able to look past what was mechanically, a style of writing that I really didn't like (the prose felt very disjointed).

When I moved on to Count Zero, I found that the story wasn't sufficiently enthralling to make up for the issues I had with the style, so I could never get through it.

About ten years later, somehow or another I came to find myself in possession of Gibson's Pattern Recognition (I don't remember if I bought it because of a good review, or just wanted to give him another shot).

For whatever reason, I found that I didn't have any of the issues with his style getting in the way for me. I don't know if his writing actually changed (a possibility, as it was his 7th novel), of if I was just a different person by that point, and now more able to appreciate the way he writes.

I ended up liking Pattern Recognition immensely (and both of the other novels in that trilogy), even though people have made valid complaints about the actual plot of the novels.

I then went back and re-read the rest of the Sprawl trilogy, and found it easier to digest this time.

So you might also find that his later work is less confusing.

I don't really have an opinion as to how it relates to SciFi as a whole, as I really don't like SciFi as a genre in and of itself (as a contrast, I actually hated Enders Game when I read it as a kid).

I think that basically he just always writes novels set in the sociotechnical landscape of approximately 2015, (space station and strong AI excluded).

As we approach 2015, his novels become less and less far-flung. In ca. 2005, I used to find myself in Gibsonesque situations about once or twice a year, now it's monthly...

Pretty soon we'll be living there.

INTERVIEWER: You’ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always instead a treatment of the present.

GIBSON: There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.

I'd like to find myself in a city where Gibsonesque situations are the default entertainment. And the job of an entertainer might then become close to a calling.

A good thing to keep in mind when reading the Sprawl trilogy is that the writing style and sense details are more important than the plot, which is basically a series of Macguffins. Orson Scott Card's stories are the opposite: Plot drives everything, and simplistic prose carries you through. They're both valid types of fiction, but make for totally different experiences.

When you put down a Card novel, you remember the story arc. When you put down a Gibson novel, you remember the images. Everyone knows the opening line of Neuromancer, but few people quote lines from Ender's Game. Everyone remembers the ending of Ender's Game, but many people forget the ending of Neuromancer, even if they enjoyed it.

This may be a case of the exception proving the rule but...

"The enemy's gate is down" is fairly quotable and has appeared both in http://xkcd.com/241/ and in HPMOR (Chapter 33 from memory...)

Ah, good point, I forgot about that. As a general rule, though, Card's novels aren't very quotable, and when they are, the quote is closely tied to the plot. If you didn't know how it related to Ender's development as a tactician and thinker, "The enemy's gate is down" wouldn't be a very impressive line. Meanwhile, Gibson throws off eye-popping lines every other page. Compare these two examples:

"Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too." - Ender's Game

If you don't know what Ender is referring to, this quote loses almost all of its power. If you've read the story, though, this line is killer.

"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." - Neuromancer

You don't need to have read the novel to appreciate the quote. Beyond the novelty and aesthetic beauty of the writing, it's very information-dense: You can get an excellent sense of the novel's setting, themes, conflict, and main character just from these three sentences.

Funnily enough Neuromancer is one of the novels I've found that non-SF folk actually quite like. Possibly because it borrows from some of the film-noir tropes and is written in a more "literary" style than much SF. But I'm a huge Gibson fan so may well be biased :-)

A couple of things to bear in mind when reading it.

First Neuromancer was published in 1984. It was the novel that pretty much invented the whole cowboy-hacker image that's been reused a bazzilion times since. The whole idea of "cyberspace" the "matrix". Of custom hacker tools. Super-human AIs with less than human motivations. Of an international data-sphere used by companies. The rise of the global multi-national. The magical influence of the 1% of the 1% superrich. All of it in a much more "gritty" realistic world. Neither dystopian or utopian.

So much of this is just the general background to the whole SF genre now. Or indeed reality.

Just as a book of ideas it just blew me away at the time I first read it in 1989. Five years after it was first published. When most of the world had no clue what e-mail or the internet was. When my neighbour thought the AI in my degree was "Artificial Insemination" not "Artificial Intelligence" (that was a really confusing and funny conversation - "I never knew you were interested in farming" :-)

Second was how it compared to the rest of SF at the time. The kind of fiction folk like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley were putting out was just so... different from most of the SF that was out there at the time. Gibson's was the first novel length work I'd read in that style and... wow... it just blew me away.

Don't get me wrong - I love Ender's game too. In the same way I can love "Of Mice and Men" and "Moby Dick" - despite there radically different literary styles.

It's hard for me to divorce Neuromancer from the time I read it in. If I'd grown up reading Charlie Stross, Neal Asher and Richard Morgan then I'm sure that it would feel vastly less original. But for me, anyway, its a book I still love.

The way I see Gibson's work, in particular Neuromancer, is basically as impressionism in novel form. If you look closely at any of the individual details you will become hopelessly lost and confused, however if you roll with that feeling and absorb the entire work you start to realize that his haphazard description and detail are, very effectively in my opinion, painting an incredibly vibrant image of a drab, desperate, and depressed society.

Compared to Gibson, I would describe Scott Card's work as very crisp high contrast paintings of stick figures. Easy reading, but really nothing of interest in the slightest if you are looking for more than just a plot. The XKCD of SF. (Also, I'd highly suggest sticking to the Ender series of books if you do insist on reading Scott Card. I made the mistake of reading A Memory of Earth without knowing what I was getting myself into first...)

For what it's worth, Gibson's Bridge trilogy is much more accessible than Neuromancer, though I can't say that I think he ever quite hit as high a note as Neuromancer.

Gibson's early novels are very much under the spell of classic hardboiled detective fiction. He claims to favor Dashiell Hammett while disliking Raymond Chandler, but if you read The Big Sleep and Neuromancer in parallel it's clear Chandler was a significant influence. They have the same strengths (e.g. style) and the same weaknesses (e.g. plotting).

> They aren't only inaccessible but actually off putting to anyone but a dedicated reader.

Can't really agree with this, but I'm not sure how to respond without sounding like an elitist prick. If someone made the same comment about, say, functional programming languages, wouldn't you say it's not so much a matter of them being inaccessible and off-putting as simply different? And isn't there some value -- a lot of value, actually -- in those differences?

> Whatever your thoughts on SciFi, you'll fall in love with Ender and take a very deep interest in his story.

I don't understand the affection for Ender's Game. I read it in grade school and I reread it last summer; the plot is elementary (Ender's a textbook Mary Sue) and the takeaways are either empty or grim -- there's so much wanton violence (think back to the incident with the bully) and either Card is excusing it 'for the greater good', or condemning basically every character in the novel for engaging and condoning it.

The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, was much more interesting, but I think my perceptions of that book are a bit too tainted by my knowledge of the author's personal opinions.

I agree Ender's Game is elementary. It's to Dune what Harry Potter is to LOTR.

It's the character himself that's appealing. He's innocent and his burden is so huge...You just feel for him. You want him to get through it...it doesn't seem fair..you want to help him...protect him.

I'm pretty sure Card intended to condemn the wanton violence; either that, or the later books (which I also hugely prefer) were revisionist on the topic. He never characterizes Ender as anything but a monster, at best, he's an ignorant monster; the period between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead is an explicit search for redemption. Ender's Game was meant as a prequel, as I understand it, rather than to stand on its own.

That said, I've stopped recommending anything in the Ender books. There's just not enough there anymore.

Ender's Game came about as a necessary prequel to Speaker. Speaker for the Dead definitely isn't revisionist, it is the actual story.

(Source is Card's afterward to the 20th anniversary edition of Ender's Game.)

You read Gibson too late in your life I think.

I think even Gibson wouldn't disagree with what you wrote.

His later books reflect what he later found out. That reality has in many ways caught up with his books.

But to me those books still stand above many else cause I read them at a time where they were seen as a possible scenario. They where the promise of a darker but more exciting future.

I don't know if I agree with the confusing aspect, I think if you read them for what they are and don't try to overanalyse or question the direction it works a lot better. It's a bit choppy, and definitely contrived in places but it was also his first real work, Neuromancer alone is massively important for science fiction as it kick started an entire shift towards cyberpunk for a good decade or so.

I read it when I was about 12ish, so nearly 15 years ago. Reading it at that point in my life, in that point of human history as computing was starting to become an incredibly large part of daily life made it a lot more interesting, but society and science and fiction have come a long way since this, so it feels quite anachronistic in it's own way.

I highly recommend re-reading Neuromancer with a copy of Study Guide: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/neuromancer.ht...

I've read Neuromancer multiple times, because I just love Gibson's style, high tech low life has never been done better.

The multitude of ideas in each paragraph is simply stunning. There are thousand short sci-fi stories hiding behind each allusion.

That said, I have to agree, it is not very accessible to someone new to science fiction.

> I've read Neuromancer multiple times, because I just love Gibson's style, high tech low life has never been done better. Me too :) t > The multitude of ideas in each paragraph is simply stunning. There are thousand short sci-fi stories hiding behind each allusion.

Still... reading "virtual light" last summer I got confused by the embedded fax machine everywhere (even in the back of car seats if I remember correctly...) trashing out some papers for reading... How did he miss e-mails or "text on screen" for these scenes ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com