Neuromancer excerpts

These excerpts will try to be on the subject of human relationships to technology.

"She held out her hands, palms up, with her white fingers sightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails." Weapons attached to humans is a deadly advancement which makes life seem more fragile.


"His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba." (p.12) Paying for eternal youth creates a interesting contrast to todays society where people try to chase the same goals but on a less advanced level.


"Your biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine". Genetic manipulation and forced drug rehabilitation show technological and social aspects that aren't present in todays society.


"The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular extract, retailing ir for a wider margin than usual" (p.11) We see that not only are things like this present in this futuristic world but they are peddled by random urban dwellers like an counterfeit good or illegal drug.

"Someone scored a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst drowning the arcade in a white sound as a lurid hologram fireball mushroomed overhead." (p.17)

"His buyer for three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn't taking any calls." (p.20)

"You need a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency." (p.45) This would be normal today if the setting were not considered. A world where this can be a realistic conversations for normal to poor people shows great advancement in medicine followed by the reduction of prices for those services.

"Chinese bloody invented nerve splicing"(p.4)Where organ transplants we can relate to this technological advancement is one we can't really grasp on what it is or how realistic something like this could be.

Neuromancer Setting

Reading Neuromancer I discover that I do not have very much experience with reading science fiction. I am having a hard time learning what rules apply, what we are expected to know and what we learn as we go along. I have been able to pick up some clues to the setting of the novel.

The first paragraph says things like the "sky was the color of a television" and references Japanese quickly tell us that we are on earth and in modern or futuristic Japan and in an urban area. We know that they still speak Japanese and are metroposistic and and big enough of a travel hub to have a bar regularly filled with immigrants. Using just this information we can judge that Case has already lived through some adventures and the story isn't going to be a of an innocent farm boy who goes on an epic adventure but of Case who has a past he must deal with and the events that unfold because of it.

When Gibson talks about video arcades and how commonplace they seem we get the sense that the world is more technologically orientated than todays world and that pop culture is represented largely by the video game culture.

With the speed usage, easy weapon acquisition, and prostitution we can assume that Case is in a slum or bad area of Chiba. This helps us believe that he is on the run and lives the kinda of life where a random person he knows would want him dead. This would be much more unusual and unbelievable he he was living the high life of this huge metropolis and still having people wanting him dead and having to watch his back at all times.