So many books, so little time

Given my preferences in art and music, it's a wonder it took me so long to get around to reading Neuromancer. I was a massive fan of the 'retrowave' aesthetic that swept the internet in the 2010s, which had clear links to cyberpunk. That combination of 'hi-tech low-life' and neon lights under a rainy Japanese skyline really spoke to some part of me, a part of me that longed for new sights and experiences in life. But ultimately, my interest in cyberpunk was an aesthetic one at the time.

In recent years I haven't been as overtly focused on the cyberpunk aesthetic but I did become very interested in topics such as psychedelics and the nature of consciousness. I got deep into thinkers such as Terrence Mckenna (another early cyperspace enthusiast) and Alan Watts, as well as a general interest in psychedelic art and music. Last but not least I got into some of the more dreamy work of HP Lovecraft, whose vivid and colorful prose really caught my fancy.

It was a pleasant surprise to see that Neuromancer really pleased all these facets of my preferences. I came into it expecting it to be mostly an aesthetic experience and that it was, but what I really love about this book is the way the imagery and broader themes really play off of eachother and drive the story forward.

A particularly evocative instance of this is when the main character Case notices a display of shurikens in behind a store window. Gibson wrote of them:

"They were mounted against scarlet ultra suede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fish line, their centers stamped with dragons or yin yang symbols. They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome."

Aside from this being an excellent description of the shurikens themselves, this line also says something about Case. At this point in the book he is a wayward spirit, barely getting by on a life of drug use and petty crime... But all the same, Case does have ambition and longing for something more. Gibson captures this along with the vivid imagery by saying his destiny is spelled out by these shurikens, made of 'cheap' chrome. You can really visualize the image of the twisted neon reflected in the shurikens, and a lonely depressed man looking into the glass.

Despite his dire circumstances, Case's flaws aren't the most important thing about him in this story. Case formerly had the ability to jack into 'cyberspace' as a sort of rogue hacker called a 'console cowboy'. Cyberspace is described as follows:

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."

Gibson employs this cyberspace concept for some of the most vivid and rich imagery in the book, particularly in the passage where case first 'jacks in' to the matrix in the book-