Absorbing the Information

I recently tried for a second time to read William Gibson's Neuromancer, which I have long been told is perhaps the most important contemporary science fiction novel, and for the second time I failed--although this time I did make it to page 85, which is about 50 pages farther than I got the first time.

I was defeated mostly by passages such as the following:

At midnight, synched with the chip behind Molly's eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. "Mainline." Nine moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent, Blue Nine, into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.

I suppose that this sort of infodumping is part of the admission price in most science fiction, but I confess I have a hard time slogging my way through it, an even harder time actually caring about the "information" once it's been dumped on me. I know that I am eventually supposed to understand what a "link man" is, who the "moderns" are, what the "Sprawl" is, and why "MAX EMERG" is a code being used. That the "Sense/Net Pyramid" is a highly significant sort of thing will become clear. But since the presentation of these things in the pedestrian prose of this paragraph has left me indifferent, I also know I'm not going to be able to muster up much interest when they make their inevitable returns. A passage like this doesn't so much incite my imagination as it does beat it into submission.

Perhaps this kind of interlude would be tolerable if it were just an occasional hazard, but unfortunately in Neuromancer such piling-on of exotic details just keeps on coming. And perhaps I would be more willing to accept that as a necessary part of the "world-building" of science fiction if I could take some interest in the novel's plot and characters, or find some other aesthetic attraction to offset the tedium of the endless exposition, but alas the characters are made of the thinnest of cardboard (limited almost exclusively to their function as devices to advance the story), the "plot" seems just a retread of the Hollywood thriller with its international cartels and conspiracies as objects of intrigue, and the writing itself never rises much beyond the perfunctory--move the characters through their melodramatic paces, offer up the "vision" supposedly invoked by the unfamiliar terms, occasionally pause to feature some snappy dialogue. Finally it seems that the unfamiliar terms and their world-building are primarily what the novel exists to provide, as if the accumulation of the nomenclature in itself is some kind of aesthetic accomplishment.

Maybe I'm asking of science fiction such as Neuromancer something it isn't intended to provide. Maybe "art" is not what draws most of its audience to the genre, and thus I should just leave it to those who do appreciate what it wants to do. I'd still like to think, however, that science fiction can have aesthetic interest that isn't overridden by the need to "say something" about the future (and implicitly about the present), turning fiction almost entirely into a form of cultural criticism.

Comments

[Joseph Laizure]

One reason I appreciate Neuromancer (and especially Gibson's next book, Count Zero) is that the information, as in the passage quoted in the post, seems to me to be more of an aesthetic strategy than an attempt at commentary: less like world-building, more like atmosphere. The specifc meaning of MAX EMERG to the plot or the world matters less than the feeling it creates, succinctly given in the often-quoted phrase "high-tech, low life." But I'm prepared to admit that my feelings in this regard may have to do with reading those novels when I was 16 and not discerning about what I liked. I do agree with you about the characters and plot.

[Jonathan Mayhew]

The prose is not just pedestrian but syntactically uncertain in places. "the information that" and "at midnight, synched..." What is synched, midnight, the man, or the command?

[Steven Augustine]

I've argued before that most hard Sci Fi is damned for structural reasons; that it fails as Art because Art is the art of what *isn't* shown/said/played whereas these Projected Worlds are too alien to be taken for granted on even a basic, day-to-day level (ie, even the toilets need describing when the toilets are on Altair XV, a chore DeLillo gets to skip). There's also the question of the degree to which the writer trusts her/his typical reader to be smart enough to require less exposition. Which is why Ada is such a (beautiful) lead balloon: Nabokov trusted his readers not at all.

In contrast, Calvino's T-Zero and Cosmicomics are great works of the (loosely defined) genre, imo.

Aside: DFW's attack on Updike's sublime Toward the End of Time rankled for a related reason, in that DFW mocked (among other things) the paucity of exposition re: the "Sino-American War"... whereas, in fact, Updike coded that reality into the novel more plausibly, and loomingly, by exercising a sure hand's greater restraint.

Finally, Gibson is not a greater stylist than, say, Richard Morgan (whose Altered Carbon was pressed on me by a friend who didn't know better). The excerpted sentences don't come close to singing. A cannier stylist wouldn't have packed that short passage with so many flow-killing hads, havings and had-beens.

[Shelley]

You beat me. I didn't make it past that fourth line.

[Bythefirelight]

I always thought I would give his works a try, but with a quote like that, I'm not so sure. It's kind of clumsy and not doesn't move syntax in any new directions that strange syntax should. Have you tired Phillip K Dick? He was on my list to try, too. Wonder if I'll be just as disappointed?

[Dan Green]

I have to admit I've had much the same problem with Dick that I had with Neuromancer--although if anything Dick is even less of a stylist than Gibson. I intend to give Dick's work another try, however.

[Lloyd Mintern]

Try TIME OUT OF JOINT by Phillip K. Dick, or DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRONIC SHEEP? He is absolutely a stylist is this important sense: he writes from the point of view of his characters. They are stranded in what are now very familiar, hilariously constructed, settings.

[Jennifer from Superstition Review]

I agree with previous statements about Phillip K. Dick. He presents a world in the future but retains the foundation of the present world to make it more seamless. Yes, there are robots and futuristic listen devices, but there are still apartment buildings and cars. When a book like Neuromancer is too far away from the average reader it falls flat. I think the best science fiction takes what is known and moves forward (or backward) a few feet from there. It's an awful shame when Sci-Fi is reduced to useless fantasy, for classic sci-fi (The Time Machine by Wells, for instance) gives a clear scope of the human condition by being apart from it just enough to be magical. Good luck on Neuromancer and thank you for your thoughts on the topic of genre information overload.

[CO]

Glad I'm not the only one. I so want to like Gibson. I own a DVD copy of No Maps for These Territories, and I find him a very fascinating man with unqiue ideas about the way we live. But he's not a good writer. I don't know how else to put it.

[Craig Pay]

Well I have read Neuromancer and it's one of my all time favourite reads, but that was a very long time ago. I tried to read it again last year and only made it through the first couple of pages. It's dated. A lot. Personally I think it's time to move on - the whole genre has moved on. I personally wouldn't recommend K Dick although I would rate him. Go for something contemporary, there's plenty out there. Just look up the Clarke Award and start working back from 2011. China Mieville, now Lauren Beukes, Neal Stephenson. Cyberpunk died with Snowcrash (which is a funny read). Too many people looking back at sci-fi from 20+ years ago.

[Sonia]

I couldn't get through the first page of Neuromancer. LOL It's suppoesed to have started the cyberpunk subgenre or at least made it more visible, and it's probably worth reading for that alone. But I couldn't get through the first page.

[Dan Green]

It certainly doesn't seem to say much for the lasting value of SF--at least one of its supposedly canonical texts--that the genre should have to "move on" and readers urged to refrain from "looking back." If only "20+" years makes a work so dated it can't be read, the genre doesn't have much going for it in the first place.

[Dan Holloway]

I've never read Gibson though he is perennially "next from the top" of my to-be-read list. I think I must be reading a different passage, because to me this is prose polished and primed and perfect. Any doubt about the author's prosecraft is cast aside by

"Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves."

That's about as beautifully writtena sentence as you could hope to find, and the paragraph blooms out from it. It's sharp, it's hip, and *so* atmospheric. And this isn't the infodump of an amateur writer who doesn't realise they need to give their prose a chance to breathe. This is an infodump used the way Bolano uses the killings in 2666.

It's great that people like different things, and I just love this.

[Dan Green]

"It's great that people like different things, and I just love this."

You're welcome to it.

[Joseph]

It's a long time since I read Neuromancer. I think it was 1986. But I read it twice and nothing has excited me so much since. Gibson does not do info dumps. That's the beauty of his work. The concepts are just there, fully realised. His early work does stand the test of time. I have been re-reading his short stories, written before Neuromancer, and they are perfect. To me his ideas seem even stronger in the light of how technology and society has actually developed. I really admire his prose too. It is tight, taut and clever. There is controlled emotion in his writing and it can hit you like a punch in the stomach. Not everything he writes is good but the best of it is the equal of any writer's best work. I have tried to explain why here:

http://josephgrinton.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/contemporary-style/