Genre: Fiction—Science Fiction & Cyberpunk
Completed: 25 March 2018
Summary & Review:
Case, a once talented hacker who now can no longer access the “matrix” after being poisoned by a former boss, lives a nearly-suicidal life of despair until a skilled street mercenary saves his life and recruits him to work for a shadowy figure named Armitage. In exchange for repairing his damaged nervous system allowing him to once again enter cyberspace, Case must help him hack an unknown entity. As he works with Armitage, he and Molly look into the man’s background and unearth who is really behind the whole scheme: an illegal artificial intelligence created by a powerful, reclusive family.
I’m not going to lie, I didn’t love this book. Maybe the cyberpunk genre just isn’t for me. I read Snow Crash (#279) by Neal Stephenson and didn’t like that book much, either. More recently, I read another of Stephenson’s novels, Seveneves (#411), and really liked it so my distaste of Snow Crash apparently wasn’t due to Stephenson’s lack of skill as an author. Perhaps, it was just the genre.
Neuromancer is regarded as a classic SciFi book so I’ll always be glad I read it, but I didn’t enjoy the experience of doing so. I can see how it influenced a lot of other books and seemed to predict a lot of what would happen with technology in the decades after it was published, but I thought it was, by and large, a confusing mess. Gibson constantly used his own jargon that he never bothered to explain or define and would often throw in a character and then expect us to know all about the person and why he was important. Sorry, Gibson, I don’t care about your world as much as you do so you gotta give me a little help remembering who is who and what is what.
Rating: 4.0
No comments:
Post a Comment