Like This? Try These!number9dream by David Mitchell(2002)Takes Gibson’s (and Haruki Murakami’s)project and buries it a layer down in a novelabout what it means to live your life throughgenre fiction.

Electric by Chad Taylor (2004)This time around the city in question isAuckland, rather than Tokyo or New York,but the feeling is the same. New Zealandnoir with drugs, data and some verycool maths.

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BOOK CLUB MUST-READ CLASSICS OF SF LITERATURE

>> “One of my favouritebooks of all time. Gibson’sreworking of classic noirtropes opened my eyeswhen I first read it back inthe ’80s and it’s one ofthose books that I keepcoming back to.”David Devereux

>> “Then you readNeuromancer for thethrills, the gadgets, thegirls with implants and thedrugs. Now you read it cosit’s a classic, it’s bloodyliterary fun and you stillhave the girl with therazor blades!”Gaspar

>> “Can I be the first tosay that I hate this book?(Yep – Ed ). There’s a lotthat’s probably terriblyimportant for the time butit’s not an enjoyable read.The flipping betweencyberspace and reality isill-defined and confusing.”BobMcCow

>> “Awful book. Boringbook. Avoid this book.Kudos for inventing theidea of cyberspace – buthe can’t write.” jstarbuc k

>> “Neuromancer is avery important book. Butwhen you get down to it,it’s pretty pedestrianstuff. Retrospect has nottreated it kindly.”Jedit

>> “I read the firsthandful of pages and putit down. I’ve no intentionof picking it up again.”DocSavage

>> “You’re not meant tolike the characters inNeuromancer ; you’remeant to pity them. It’s acautionary tale.”niallmccann

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BOOK CLUB

Get Reading!>> In SFX 166, ChristopherPriest will be discussingRichard Matheson’s I Am 

Legend , now a Will Smithblockbuster (see p56)!NEXT ISSUE: Prepare to

be spooked as Doctor 

Who scribe Paul Cornell

reads MR James’sCollected Ghost Stories .

Scarlett Thomas jacks in to the cyberpunk classic

William Gibson, 1984

Before I sat down to begin writingmy novel The End of Mr Y , I didsomething I’ve never done before.I went around the housegathering up books that I thought

would be inspirational in some way.This was unlike me, because I usually

try to shrug off influences, but this timeI knew exactly how I wanted my novelto make people feel, and I wanted tohave books around me that had made me feel like that. Neuromancer was the firstnovel that I pulled off the shelf, and therecent HarperCollins edition sat, shinyand blue, on my desk for the year it tookme to write my novel.

I barely opened Neuromancer in thattime, and when I did it was just to readthe odd sentence, and to remind myselfof Gibson’s spare, post-Beat style. It wasmore of a talisman; and it was areminder of the adventure I’d had – orimagined – while I was reading it for thefirst time. This was a novel I’d taken tothe dentist with me because the onlyway I could get through the surgery wasto pretend I was hacker protagonist Case– or perhaps “razorgirl” mercenaryMolly – receiving some kind of neuralintervention, or a sexy implant.

I walked around Torquay, with itscold, tranquillising neon, and I imaginedbeing chased through the grey winterstreets, thinking about where I would goto have that moment Case has near thestart of the novel, where he realises thedifference between an empty fear that“something” might happen, and themore tangible sense that you couldactually be shot and killed and thatwould be it. This is certainly a novel youhave to jack into. Or perhaps you let itjack into you.

Of course, reading this novel now isvery different from how it must havebeen in 1984, when words like“cyberspace” and “microsoft”, andphrases like “the matrix” probablydidn’t mean anything very much (okay,there’d been a kind of matrix in DoctorWho, and cyberspace had appearedbefore in Gibson’s work). Now, ofcourse, it’s hard to read the novelwithout feeling a bit weird when youmeet a boy with “a dozen spikes ofmicrosoft protruding from the socket

interested in the way in which Gibsonused noun-based writing to createsomething way beyond a predictable,generic adventure story. Of course, theplot of Neuromancer, once you take awaythe microsofts, simstims and razorgirls,is familiar. Case, surrounded by alliesand enemies, goes on the same kind ofquest that heroes have always gone on,from Odysseus to Luke Skywalker.

Gibson has written about beinginspired by The Velvet Underground, andtwo of the greatest noun-based writers of all time: Raymond Chandler and WilliamBurroughs. And what makes Case’s questdifferent is the mood Gibson createsaround it. His prose cracks and pops likea console on fire, and you feel that LouReed could be singing along. There aresentences that have been pared down toan almost Russian level of syntax: noarticles, only objects. So a scene may beset like this: “Late afternoon, by the feelof the sun, its angle.”

Gibson can be poetic in longersentences, too. Early in the novel, Casebecomes obsessed with shuriken (Japanesethrowing weapons): “They caught thestreet’s neon and twisted it, and it cameto Case that these were the stars underwhich he voyaged, his destiny spelledout in a constellation of cheap chrome.”

Gibson can also write sex better thanany other male SF writer. It’s alwayspretty brief, but that’s okay. Andwhether Case’s sidekick Molly is closerto blow-up doll or punk princess on thefeminist spectrum, one thing’s for sure:she has very cool fingernails... SFX

Scarlett Thomas’s novel The End of MrY concerns a cursed book containing  instructions on entering theTroposphere, an alternate world whichallows visitors to enter other people’sminds. Philip Pullman called it “acracking good yarn”.

behind his ear”. And it’s prettyimpossible to be unaware of all thefolklore trailing along behindNeuromancer, tugging at its skirts. Towhat extent is the Matrix trilogy basedon Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy? Did Gibson,as Jack Womack once suggested, not justcoin the term “cyberspace”, but inwriting it down somehow invent it?How much of our pre-post-human worldhas cyberpunk created anyway? And arewe the first era that has been totally(re)invented by fiction, or has it alwaysbeen that way?

But none of this was really whatbrought me back to this novel. I was

Gibson 

can 

write 

sex 

better than any other male SFwriter. It’s always prettybrief, but that’s okay

Neuromancer

 

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112  SFX MAGAZINE  Christmas 2007

SFX164.bookclub 112 5/11/07 3:31:08 pm