Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/21/kindle-edition-of-neuromancer.html
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Same on apple books store thing too.
Cool beans eh?
So what is the low price you are speaking of? How else would I know if the price has gone up again?
Not in the UK - it’s £6 on Kindle - and cheaper to buy in paperback (£4.50) including shipping! Amazing book though - must resist re-reading it immediately!
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In the US it’s $2.
This is a strange book for me. I love so much of what came after it, but Neuromancer itself is a hard read for me. I’m not a super sophisticated reader. so a lot of the mystery in the book ends up just being confusion for me.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
…which used to mean it was grey, but now means it’s… bright blue? Hmm…
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from the very first line of the introduction:
It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful—a whopping anachronism, right at the very start of my career in the imaginary future.
But an invisible one, interestingly; one that reveals a peculiar grace enjoyed by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future, where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers. Readers compensated for me, shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden, and allowed whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on the melancholy of the phrase “dead channel.”
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I first read it in around 2012 I think. Its prescience was so unsettling and astonishing - it blew me away. Once i learned to lean into its complexity I devoured it, and the other two in the trilogy.
One of my favorite books! I’d be tempted to buy it if I didn’t already have a couple paperback copies and a hardbound edition. The first time I read the book (early 2000’s) I was on a business trip doing some IT training. I had heard about the book as it comes up pretty often in pop-tech-culture and it always sounded like a book I’d enjoy. Toward the end of our third day of training the instructor became sheet white and ran out of the room, 15 minutes later a receptionist came into the classroom and told us the rest of the class for the day was canceled and we’d have a new instructor tomorrow. So I went back to my hotel room and grabbed the book and went to a small pub that had a fenced in backyard with seating. I wound up sipping bourbon and chain smoking Drum rollies in the backyard of that pub for the next 10 hours as I read the book from front to back in one sitting because it was so good. Class the next day was not fun. On a side note when I play online games I almost always use Wintermute as my gamertag.
Read it in 1984 when first released, when I was a sci-fi devouring teen. It felt like prophecy; this was well before the world wide web, bank machines were just coming out, video games were still blocky (I was programming on a BBC microcomputer at the time). This was the future, clear as day. Haven’t read anything since that felt so prescient.
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Ah yes, our wonderful VAT laws strike again.
Although even Gibson admits that in terms of prescience, he missed 1) The collapse of the Communist Bloc (even though in retrospect it was obvious that they were on their last legs in the 1980s) and 2) The whole idea of mobile phones. Payphones are actually a plot point at one point.
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Did you ever find out what happened?
Hannu Rajaniemi’s latest book, Summerland, is only $2.99.
Coincidence, or some kind of sale?
Given the context, I’ll say warring AIs fighting over resources by price-shifting product.
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It was food poisoning or a really bad flu that hit him and he basically had seconds before he started throwing up everywhere. Which is why the color seemed to drain from his face and he didn’t say anything when he dashed out of the room. My work used to use the same training facility so while I never got the whole story I did see him a few years later still teaching there so I assume he just had a hell of a 24 to 48 hours of hugging porcelain when that bug hit.
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