The reader, as a human, is responsible not for arbitrating meaning, but simply for keeping up. The metaphor that a mind in this world initially reaches for is technological, not organic. From the very first sentence, almost as famous as that of Pride and Prejudice – “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel” – Gibson has pushed us into a world where the measure of the human is the machine. Like Pat Cadigan’s Synners, Neuromancer is considered a foundational text of cyberpunk, and one of the core tenets of that particular movement is the refusal to explain anything at all. Ken McLeod once said of Neuromancer‘s plot that it was “intricate and forgettable”, a phrase which holds in its depths a clue as to how the entire damn book should be read. The Great Reread, #5: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.The Great Reread, #6: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.
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