On Neuromancer

What did I just read?

This book was a whirlwind. It took me forever to get into, and then I read the last two acts in a single sitting. It’s hard to know what to make of it; much of what’s here has since been covered by more recent cyberpunk in fiction and film, but there’s a lot I’m holding onto. One thing that blows me away is the way the natural world is described in the language of technology — it’s clear from the first pages, and part of the challenge of reading the book is simply working out what’s going on. Gibson throws you in and trusts you to figure it out for yourself; give it time and patience and you will, even if it isn’t clear at the start, and eventually you acclimate to his cyberpunk dystopia and his way of describing things starts to feel natural.

What I take from Gibson is how he sees the difference between late capitalism — extra-late capitalism, here — and what came before. Pre-capitalist society, represented by Tessier-Ashpool, was driven entirely by humans, over human needs and desires; Gibson’s late-capitalist world is cybernetic, made of automatic feedback loops that keep it growing, and it can’t be destroyed. It can keep developing at its own pace, or — drumroll —

it can be accelerated.

And from the moment we learn about Wintermute, we, as readers who know the conventions of fiction, know that this is exactly what will happen. The characters don’t fight it; they’re too busy looking out for their own lives, having struggled too long already. And that is what makes capitalism a tragedy. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, by way of Mark Fisher: “Capitalism [was] a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance.’” But now that it’s here, it looks indestructible. Freud looms large over the text, too — the death drive and the libido both — though I haven’t read enough Freud to say exactly how; it’s most obvious with Case and 3Jane, but there may be other characters Gibson is working on Freudian grounds. I wish I had something more settled to say about what it all means, but I don’t yet. What I do know is that I’m absolutely fascinated, and there’s so much here to unpack.