Nah. Different people view it differently. The plot isn't crazy complex. Character development is easy to follow. In my opinion, some people get choked up on how hyper-descriptive Gibson is. I love it. He is one of my favorite mind-candy reads.

i love his prose and descriptions as well I think it really shows a feeling of being on edge and uncomfortable with the long sentences and lots of words. it’s great

Check out Pattern Recognition by Gibson. Not hard aci-fi, but so very engrossing. More complexity on plot, same lovely language. His description of jet lag alone sums it up in a way I never thought about, but is perfect.

I’ll check it out, thank you!

I think maybe the "lack of visualization" you described is why some people struggle with it. I've always assumed that effect is deliberate, since the protagonists spend basically the whole plot traveling from place to place drunk, drugged, exhausted, and jet lagged. Personally I love it.

The plot does get a lot more complicated though, I think it took me two reads to really understand everything.

I feel like the language (slang, technology) might be difficult for someone completely new to the genre or who read it early on. Now though I think a lot of the cyberpunk concepts have become familiar to the general public. Stuff like hacking, VR, jacking in, cybernetics, cyber crime etc. we've been seeing on TV and big budget movies for decades now. The plot and characters are pretty straightforward from what I remember

EDIT: Thinking more on it I'm really curious what a first reading would be like for someone with truly fresh eyes (especially upon release when cyberpunk wasn't really even a thing). Seeing movies lie The Matrix, Bladerunner, Akira made me want to start reading cyberpunk and I had by then for sure absorbed many more of the concepts from other media too.

I think it’s deliberate too, Case can barely go 5 minutes without drugs lol

How far into it are you? In the final third things start moving fast without always giving clear explanations of what happened and why and that's what readers usually struggle with. You may not have gotten there yet.

That’s fair. I’m about halfway through it. The reason I made the post was because I had seen reviews and such that said it was difficult to grasp from the beginning. I’m just personally not having that issue.

IMO, it is not hard sci fi, it's 'soft' sci fi. gibson himself says he knows nothing of technology, and typed it on a typewriter.

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while dated, It's still a fun ride, and I agree, it leaves much to the imagination, that's one of its strong points.

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I like all Gibsons novels, his last two trilogies are his best, imo.

You’re right it’s not hard in the science-ness

In "Pattern Recognition" ,Gibson describes jet lag as 'Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.' I shared that quote with a friend. He said it made no sense and confused him. Some people like one author's style over another.

Oooooo I love that. It must be a personal preference thing.

It's not that it's hard to grasp as such; it is just Gibson's style of writing. A lot of writers spend a lot of time building their world then setting the characters in motion. Gibson just drops people into the middle of the story and lets the reader experience everything along with the characters. It can be difficult for some to adjust to the difference but for me, I like the change of style and once you know it's there, it makes the rest of his stuff really enjoyable.

I love stories like that being dropped in is so immersive.

I thought it was hard to read

I also read it twice and still needed an online plot summary to fully comprehend what happened. The outline simplifies it a bunch, but when you’re reading it, it can be overwhelming.

I had a hard time trying to visualize what was going on at times, especially the moments when they'd drop into the matrix. And I'm still confused about the ending. It was my first cyberpunk novel, and only one so far, so maybe I just need more experience with the genre.

Just from the beach on is hard

I kind of thought that cyberpunk tended to explain a lot less than more traditional SF intentionally. You get thrown into the chaos, the same as the characters are thrown in. As compared to traditional SF, which often pauses at the beginning as a professor explains the situation to someone. The lack of that break also speeds up the action.

I think it's far easier than Dune, though.

Neither are hard SF, if you are referring to hard SF, meaning accurate scientifically.

I think at the time it came out, it was probably very hard for people to visualize and fill in the gaps. But you're doing that in 2022, with a lot of sci-fi books, films and tv shows to draw on.

There's a lot that just isn't explained, or explained a lot later or just suggested, but it didn't bother me because I've seen Bladerunner, and the Matrix, etc. etc.

I really enjoyed it, but the plot is a bit meh. It's more about the world building, but then again...it helped reading it now. Not sure I would have enjoyed it as much when it first came out.

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“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I've literally never heard anybody say Neuromancer was a hard read. I know some people who would call it hard to finish because they don't like it but it is no more complex than any other cyber punk novel.

it’s not hard scifi but it is some quintessential cyberpunk stuff :)

you should read neal stephenson’s snowcrash next

It starts pretty easy, the characters that get added towards the middle get a little convoluted and don’t get flushed out, and where all the paths lead in the end gets a little confusing. Upon finishing, I immediately went to google for an explanation.

I feel it’s a book that’s best understood on a second read through, which isn’t a criticism.

If you like fantasy and are dipping your toes into hard sci-fi, I highly recommend Hyperion. Definitely difficult to get into but the vignettes get progressively more rewarding, and by the end I was hooked.

Huh. My soul ended up in Ulan Bator.

No, you're not missing anything. Difficult for some =/= difficult for all.

I never felt Neuromancer was unapproachable! I have tried to read Mason & Dixon by Pynchon like 6 times though and just give up every time (The Crying of Lot 49 was good though).

Snowcrash and Diamond Age would be good follow ups

The sad part is that younger generations would expect that to be a blue "no signal" screen. But that line sets the stage so well.

This is a hard read? I would never have guessed. This happens to be my favorite book, but I never thought of it as hard to read or follow.

"The ocean below the port was the color of a television, unable to get a signal from HDMI 1"

Yeah, it was purely the visualizing that I had trouble with. I have to slow read the author and really dig into the words used to get a sense of atmosphere out of his work. The characters and plot is not difficult. But setting is such a character in cyberpunk stories, that I definitely would feel like I missed something big if I didn't give it that effort.

The book wasn't hard. The game was hard, when I was 10 years old. Then I read the book, came back to the game 20 years later and finally completed it.

I think that thought goes back to early Native American philosophy, though I could be completely wrong about that. Especially because I seem to recall coming across it in a Sam Shepard play.

I read it when I was pretty young and had never heard that it was supposed to be difficult. Had a blast, but I’m sure reading it now I would get things that didn’t make it onto my radar back then.

An author you might like,if you haven’t read already, is China Mieville. Fantastic descriptions and a whole new perspective.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an interesting read also.

Tbh if you can get through malazan then neuromancer would be a cake walk.

My experience with Neuromancer was that every page was incredibly evocative and engaging, just constant absolute bangers throughout. I also felt like I literally had no idea what was happening until two or three chapters after it had happened. Which was actually kinda neat, experiencing the story basically in hindsight while fire played out on the page in front of me. But I can certainly see how someone may be put off by it, though Gibson’s writing is probably my favourite I have read.

I've read it translated in my first language and had to read a synopsis afterward to get an idea of what happened in the book. The guy who wrote the synopsis has a PhD in Philosophy and commented it was unclear to him as well what was going on.

This was my thought exactly! I can't imagine being a new reader when it first came out and trying to visualise virtual spaces and cyberpunk landscapes without any visual lexicon to guide you. It would be so free, but also potentially so confusing!

I must say I get lost with plots quite easily, mainly because I find it hard to keep track of who's who, or I'll accidentally skip over a crucial bit of information like a fool.

With Neuromancer, like a lot of books, I kept checking the synopsis on Wikipedia as I went - being careful not to read ahead - to make sure I'd actually registered everything.

I’m definitely gonna look into Snowcrash next

I've been reading Neuromancer a few years ago and (As a non-native English speaker) found some of the passages hard to comprehend. I could not find whether it was due to my lacking language skills or the nature of the prose itself. Still the atmosphere was so enticing an captivating I kept powering through it. Felt like I was amidst a busy street of Chiba, not really grasping evrything going on around me but still being completely pulled in.

I tried to read it how I normally read, in my head, maybe 2-3 speaking speed (my gf roasts my slow reading).

Didn’t make any sense

Read it slowly, visualised what I could with what serials he gives you. Then it kinda clicks a little, then I was hooked. Very good book and mind blowing it was written so long ago!

All right. Time for me, literary semi-wanker, to do this.

William Gibson is, pretty much, a literary author. He's an English major (and former antiques picker - hence the cloisonné).

Most science fictions are, frankly terrible fucking writers. What's considered "proper" spec fic writing is considered by pretty much everyone else, absolutely shithouse writing. Yet, of course, this sort of writing is so commonplace that it's become the hallmark of the genre - it's simply how you must write science fiction.

We're talking the exposition, the info-dumps, the overwrought detail, the pointless technical asides that add nothing to the plot - it's the author jerking off in your face about how smart he is, not telling a good story for the readers.

>This is my first dip into hard SF

Interestingly, a lot of people don't consider Gibson "hard" SF, or even cyberpunk in general to be "hard".

Now, it's been my experience as a massive Gibson fan, that most "proper" science-fiction fans absolutely hate Gibson, and will shit on him at every opportunity.

I made the mistake of mentioning I was a Gibson fan - his prose is amazing by the way, and his use of voice in ATP is amazing - during my fine arts writing degree in uni, and that meant, unfortunately, lecture fuckin' paired me up with the Comp Sci and Engineering students who took our classes as electives for - heh - "easy marks".

These were hardcore nerds who boasted about only reading science fiction, hard science fiction, diamond-dick hard science fiction, 900 page novels that were part of the seven book Heptology. Books that had the worse excesses of science fiction writing like I'd mentioned above.

And they hated Gibson. His prose is "fruity", and the lack of over-description meant he was "dumb" because he didn't prove he knew what he was one about. (Why isn't there three whole pages describing how Molly's lenses integrated with her orbital sockets? How they're powered? What material they're made from, and how it was fashioned into lenses? Truth is, for the story, it don't matter...)

The focus on humanity and human characters, not tech, driving the plot forward also bugged them, and keeping track of the characters is a problem.

I'd mention some of the authors they'd read here, if I could remember them. They were out-there names you've never heard of and have to really track down. Melvin Updike? Sergei Komininsky? Who knows?

Finally, unlike a lot of "proper" science fiction authors, Gibson has no institutionalised cultural capital. A lot of these guys were pissed that someone with an English degree was - gasp! - daring to write science fiction.

Long story short, these sort of SF fans tend to dominated SF. And they're gatekeepers, the guys who decide what's good SF and what's bad. And that's why you hear so much negativity around Gibson.

>It’s described in a way that makes me think that you’re not supposed to get everything from the text and you kinda fill it out in your mind. Some descriptions aren’t very clear at all but taking from what’s in the text and imagining what makes sense in my mind works perfectly fine.

And that, my friend, is good writing - which Gibson excels at, and most spec-fic authors frankly suck at. That's what good writing is meant to do, stimulate your imagination, not simply piss words into the empty space between your ears like your noggin's a skull-shaped urinal.

Gibson's a master of this. He does in a sentence or two what most SF authors wouldn't be able to resist into dragging out into a multi-para wank.

>>That blade's under three inches, broad as a soupspoon, wickedly serrated, and ceramic. Skinner says it's a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself.

- Virtual Light

No "proper" SF author would've been able to restrain himself describing something so cool as a fractal-edge ceramic knife in only two lines.

One thing I tried drilling into the those engineering students' porcelain crania was the fact that less writing build more engagement with the reader. The more they have to pay attention and figure things out, the closer they'll read, and they'll read actively, not just gloss over whole paragraphs (my suspicion with those long-arse hard SF books is that no one really reads every line in 'em).

This is a basic tenet of good writing, but it's counterintuitive as hell. Few of them got it. Fewer still got anything more than a "Pass" in our classes...

I didn't have any problems reading it. It seemed overly descriptive at times but I figure it just felt that way because I read it after reading a short story anthology. The only part that bothered me >!was the damned shurikens that keep getting mentioned but he never does anything with.!<

It was hard to read before a lot of the stuff he came up with became reality.

I had to explain that one to my daughter when she read Neuromancer in 2017. She was like: “The sky was black?. I wanted to find something to demonstrate TV static… had to go to Youtube. No CRTs left in my house!

Okay, grumpy old man here… Neuromancer? A difficult read? Who says this?
There are some SF and Fantasy books that are indeed difficult (looking at YOU, Dhalgren!). But Neuromancer is not one of them.

I read it back in 1987-88 when it was first published in swedish. I had read a lot of classic SF like Heinlein and Clarke before that so I think thats why I picked up Gibson at my local library.

I mostly remember being blown away by the world he created. If I recall correctly my vision of cyberspace was heavily influenced by Tron. This was pre internet so that was probably the closest thing to Gibsons digital world i could reference.

I played a lot of RPGs back then and I remember trying to fit some version to cyberspace into my Traveller campaign. I never really got it to work sadly.

Nope, you are right, it's all about your attitude.

My wife must pause TV shows and re-watch certain scenes over if she misses a line of dialogue. She must see and hear every detail to enjoy it. I'm the opposite, I don't like having to closely follow every (frankly often boring) line or scene in a show.

Neuromancer is written for my style of consumption. Gibson is so good at establishing 'vibes'. It's engrossing. You feel like you're inside the book. You'll get it, if you're not obsessed with 'understanding' it.

And, if you'd like, you can read it again (and again!) and get something else out if it the next time. Like any great film, book, or painting.

It’s an easy read. It’s highly praised for the gritty noir ambience that basically became or took over a genre of sci fi books, movies, and other media. Snowcrash is a good comparison if you need a followup in the “pantheon” of sci fi, or Left Hand of Darkness.

Also the number of brand manners can be confusing for people. What the heck is a Yaheowan?? Well it's the only brand of cigarette Case likes. But it's a barrier to reading for some people. I also love Gibson's style. Many of his books are excellent.

Neuromancer is a light read. Whomever is telling you otherwise needs to get their oil checked.

Maybe, if someone finds a novel to be difficult, they should spend less time blaming the author and more time wondering why they don't understand it. Just because someone knows how to read, doesn't mean they are any good at it.

I don't know what it is, but I have tried, and failed, to finish this book many times over the years.

Who told you it was hard? I was like 14 when I read it and it was fine lol

Timing is everything. I was completely baffled when I first read it in the late 1980s. I was an omnivorous reader with a preference for literary fiction, but found techy sci-fi to be lacking in human appeal.

I’d laid hands on a computer, but had very little idea why I should be anymore interested in this flaky typewriter than in a hammer or a waffle iron or any other tool. All I remembered a month after reading was that some mostly-dead guy lived in the computer somehow. I liked Dixie, but the book itself seemed to be meant for someone else.

I read it again in the late 90s and loved it. Between those reads I went to college, minored in CS, logged on to a VAX/VMS work station almost daily to read message boards. I was horrified by AOL, thrilled by NetScape, over-the-moon for Wikipedia, etc.

My second reading took place in a completely different world and in a completely different brain. Most good books are different every time I read them, but Neuromancer — Wow!

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I love neuromancer. Have never had any trouble with it. Am also loving peripheral adaptation on Amazon!

It's a fun read, but the anachronisms are a bit jarring sometimes.

3 MB of hot RAM is nothing these days, unless it was some shit-hot paydata. (Wasn't that used elsewhere in the book, when Case had stolen from his employers, and they retaliated by frying his nervous system via mycotoxin?)

1. Gibson's particular prose style was revolutionary in genre fiction when it was introduced. Remember, the default in genre was 3rd person omniscient and American SF was not receptive to the New Wave that happened in Brit SF a decade earlier. It was a legitimate shock to average readers, introducing them to a lot of literary devices that were foreign to readers at the time, and that reputation stuck a bit.
2. Neuromancer actually marks a split in mainstream SF, especially in America, where "hard" becomes a more contentious label than before. For around 20 years, mainstream SF was predominantly "hard" science fiction in the tradition of Asimov and (to a lesser degree) Heinlein; it wasn't until the Cyberpunks started getting published that the "space ship story with elaborate physics" was challenged in genre publishing, after the New Wave failed to change American SF publishing in the late 60s and 70s.
3. Neuromancer was one of the first novel length products of the Cyberpunks. We don't really remember it now, but the Cyberpunks were a literary movement, with a manifesto and social network, a lot of editors and publishers, and an explicit goal of changing what was published in SF. In that context, the "difficulty" of Neuromancer was exaggerated in order to add literary cache to the movement as a whole.
4. So much of what was revolutionary in Neuromancer is now commonplace. The way Gibson builds worlds (with throwaway details that give a sense of lived in settings), the way he obscures parts of his narrative or leaves details out, the sociological layer added to SF and the removal of the "technobabble" that had come to dominate the genre are all common place now, part of the regular tool kit of SF. We're two, maybe three revolutions on in SF (Cyberpunk, New Space Opera, MFA science fiction), and Neuromancer has been a must read for every one of those waves, so it's DNA is basically like Genghis Khan's is in the real world: all over the place.

If you want to see what he's been up to lately, I think the Peripheral is his finest work since Count Zero, and melds his newer style of work with his more SFnal early stuff. I'm not a fan of the second book, but Peripheral is the purest distillation of what he adds to the genre as a whole, even decades later.

Read it a second time is my recommendation

I think you’re right in that your ease and enjoyment with it is based on your experience reading lots of fantasy set in other worlds. I remember having the same experience reading dune - many people had said it was difficult and confusing and I couldn’t figure out why they thought so. I think grasping another world is harder for people who don’t prefer fantasy and sci fi.

I had the same thing with Dune as well. My friends all said it was difficult and I found it just as easy as ASOIF but in space lol

This is exactly it. Neuromancer is my favourite book (tied with Flowers for Algernon. Can you guess the similarities? Heh.) and the moment his system is flushed and he's forcibly sober, the writing immediately cleans up.

Then he relapses and it gets wild again. God I need to reread this thing.

his later books about indie Jeans and evil venture capitalists are alittle harder

It's not a hard book, most people are just poor readers lol.

I think some of that is from when the book came out and the idea of the internet was novel and still very conceptual. Since a lot of people who built the internet were fans of the book they kind of designed the internet based on their imaginings from the book, so it's no longer novel and conceptual. Readers have near constant experience with the net or and have seen it depicted in hundreds of pop entertainment. So it's not as hard to read as it was 40ish years ago when it came out b/c you get the idea of hacking through a network pretty intuitively, or at least have pop images ready to slot into your imagination when you come across it.

Nailed it.

I think one of Neil Gaiman's books opens with just that "the sky was the blue of a television turned to a dead channel", as an homage. Neverwhere maybe?

That's funny! I can see him doing that too.

the major issue with Neuromancer is it was never revised. who the hell just publishes a rough draft?

The book doesn't waste time exhaustively describing and explaining all aspects of the world it references, I found it easy enough to infer and fill in gaps too but I can see how some might stumble.

The thing I find about Gibson is that his books have some of the finest production design of any author I know of. It’s a weird thing to consider in a novel, but there is such work put into that particular level of his books that nobody else gets close to.

The care and attention to detail in the worldbuilding is done with such elegant touches, sometimes barely a phrase, but in such specificity that it gives the reader so much information.

Exposition? Nah, you just gotta pay attention and catch things as they come.

Exceptionally well put! Wank on!

The phrase he uses to describe writing that book is “blind animal panic”, which makes sense, considering how utterly wild the story gets.

I feel that it's rather easy to follow for people that already consumed some cyberpunk before and are familiar with the tropes and settings. But I can see how it can be a bit confusing for readers that are new to the genre (or just most readers back when it came out).

I agree with this, but it also understates Gibson's writing ability. There is a lot of science and tech in Neuromancer that it seems like he just mentions offhand, as part of the world-building, but a lot of those casual mentions involved a decent amount of underlying research. My favorite example is the casual reference to "annealing" algorithms in Neuromancer. Everyone has heard of simulated annealing these days, but the actual math paper that introduced the concept was only published in Science in 1983. Given the publication date of Neuromancer, he would have had to have picked up that reference directly from that Science article. Apparently he also used to wander around the UBC campus and sit in random science talks, just as a kind of sponge activity for background material. It shows through in the book, even though it never, ever stands out or calls attention to itself.

Who else would you say is a literary author in spec fic or fantasy?

Dunno. Literally don't read much of spec - lord knows the stuff I've read doesn't make the grade IMHO. I've yet to find one who treats good prose as its own reward, not an impediment.

I think I figured out a hisaki(that spelling doesn't look right) was his computer about 80% of the way through and im still not sure

If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy.

- Johnny Mnemonic

Very good point - I did not know about where he'd have gotten the annealing algorithm from! That would've been near the end of him finishing the manuscript, surely, given how publishing works.

But again, that shows his restraint - and his respect for his audience (eg, he knows his audience doesn't need everything spelled out for them and they don't need to be talked down to).

Those "casual references" were another criticism - that Gibson was a STEM poseur, and thus unworthy to be even thinking of this stuff, let alone writing about it. He's just some normie appropriating and invading their subculture.

And that was the part of the split /u/supercalifragilism mentions: Gibson put humanity, not science, first in his science fiction. A lot of people don't think Gibson was bending the knee enough.

I remember someone going "HA! If they're l33t haxxors, then why don't they have smartphones?"

Then everyone pointed out those are basically tracking devices...

And now I have to go watch Hackers. LOL

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Have you read any Gene Wolfe?