. Spinning .

There’s no reason why I should force myself to read something just because it’s listed as one of the 100 books of all time and a must read. But there’s a reason why these books are listed as such, even if time has produced books far beyond it’s groundbreaking qualities.

That said, I believe I’ve so immersed myself in website changing (two weblogs and a home page) because I’m really not into Neuromancer. It indeed is a book that took the new technology of computers into a vision of a new world, and it is well written, of course, by the excellent William Gibson. While I haven’t read sci fi in a while, it was one of my favorite genres for a long time and I thought that it would be a welcoming reacquaintance. Somehow this world, which I imagine as rendered in ‘brown and white’ is just not something I’m open to right now and I think it may be best to put it aside for something more in line with my mood rather than do it injustice in my reading.

Just as I was about to back out of this book as something that wasn't my type of read, Gibson comes up with an operation for Case and a sex scene that somehow grounds it back into the reality of human feeling. Did he realize that, aside from sci fi fans, this world was a bit too seemy, too alien for the reader?

And despite body parts that are for sale and the software that can fix them, sex appears to be fairly normal. Of course, until Case touches Molly's face and gets too near her embedded glasses that serve as eyes:

Nothing particularly striking with the writing, and though I may be surprised by the language, for any regular sci fi reader it's nothing unusual. The story plot, written in third person pov, has immediately established the protagonist as Case, a man who makes his living as a middleman in the black market in an area of Japan and evidently has crossed someone named Wage who is rumored to want him dead.

So there's an establishment of environment, including setting and a time period that we guess to be somewhere in the future; an introduction to the main character and some of his acquaintances; and conflict in both the danger of his job and the immediate threat from Wage, who may or may not turn out to be the antagonist.

For me, having not read this genre for quite a number of years, the strange words and names were as halting of the reading as Burgess' Clockwork Orange. I have read student short stories in the fantasy and science fiction stream and I'm sure now that my comments about the language of an alien world were not appreciated as well as off the mark. There is a particular way that strange words, such as kirnen for beer in Gibson's novel that needs to indicate by how it's used in the sentence exactly what it is since there's no place to look up the meaning if the author has made it up. One of the flaws I see in this genre when produced by new writers is the tendency to overexplain rather than by using a word in a sentence that allows the reader to come pretty close to an accurate guess. Gibson weaves his world in a highly skilled manner that gives the information the reader needs without resorting to infodump.

Little by little, I'm getting used to the mood and rhythm of the narrative–the rhythm being somewhat like a detective story, another genre I haven't read lately–and I'm looking forward to reading on.

Evidently I can't copy and paste Amazon's book image (which only means that they don't get the link back to them either) but after running through some of my choices, I've pulled this out and read the first couple of pages.

This is very different from what I've been reading lately, and yet my reading roots are in horror and sci fi so it'll be like visiting an old friend. The opening scene, oddly enough, reminds me of A Clockwork Orange in the oddity of the language, the words and thus the characters that seem alien to us.

Should be interesting.