catalyst2 | Time has not been your friend

Just finished reading William Gibson's classic Neuromancer. I'm embarrassed to admit that in 35 years of reading SF, I have never read this book - and, to be honest, I am not sure that I should have now. I guess that my problem is that this book tries too hard to get its future projection "right" and so, where it misses, it is really obvious. The edition I had was a 20th Anniversary one and there is an additional Foreword from Gibson in which even he comments on his complete miss on mobile phone technology. When the fiction really is speculative, I don't mind. I can still read ERB's John Carter of Mars or H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds and not find the "future" vision too jarring because it doesn't even try to get it "right" - it just asks "What if?" Neuromancer fails for me because it isn't speculative enough, not in the sense of being inventive or creative but more in the sense that its characters, dspite all the bells and whistles and flash toys are just us, with the bells and whistles and flash toys!

There's good here, don't get me wrong and Gibson can pace a story very well and keep a plot rolling along. But I just didn't get immersed in this like I do in good SF - I was always aware of reading this because something always distanced me from it. What was that? Not a clue, sorry!