Yeah, @danimagoo i imagine if I read it now for the first time rather than when I was in school o would be reading it like I read early genre literature for a couple of years. Like some of the earliest detective fiction or hardboiled etc.
As I said above it really is a palimpsest for so many texts in so many different media: books, board games, video games , films, TV etc.
Agreed. When I read Sterling, I can’t help but think of him snorting speed and hammering on a keyboard. Gibson, I picture sipping a fine whiskey and tapping away slowly and carefully on an old typewriter…
Faster paced with tauter literary pulp prose and snappier dialogue. Snow Crash is more concerned with tech and almost hard SF than Neuromancer which is more like a noir crime thriller.
ETA
Not that Snowcrash isn’t a crime thriller and Neuromancer isn’t an SF novel about mind brain interfaces to online, hacking, and AIs.
Neuromancer will, I am pretty sure, feel much more like the hackneyed stereotype of cyberpunk than Snowcrash though to the reader who has not encountered it or either of them. You already know many of its tropes before you read them.
In fact, he did write Neuromancer on a manual typewriter.
I don’t think that I’ve read Snowcrash, so I couldn’t tell ya…
Yeah, it is, so I imagine it would have hit different if I’d read it as a kid closer to it’s original publication…
Tarkovsky has entered the chat.
Seriously, I agree. There’s a short list of directors who can make those long ponderous scenes engaging. Tarkovsky made them integral and engaging. I can’t imagine Solaris without that long dialogue-free shot of the freeway commute.
Hmmm, imagine a Tarkovsky-directed Neuromancer?
yeah, it’s impossible for it to seem new anymore. i think he’s even said as much himself.
( for a while it seemed he was even having troubles finding new ground to break in sci fi, period. but, i really do like his lastest stuff: peripheral and agency are both great. more relevant to now than neuromancer is or could be )
I liked it, but Stephenson is one of my favorite writers, so that’s why I asked. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the input, and @robertmckenna too.
After years of reading boring old-school Sci-Fi (Azimov etc.), I came across a brand new copy of Burning Chrome in the library. To say it was mind-blowing wouldn’t come close…
neuromancer is better. *ahem* ( okay. lots better. 
)
Gibson also flexed away from cyberpunk with the Bridge trilogy, which I love, and then Pattern Recognition. He began to lose me there but there’s no doubt he’s an important author.
Already a graphic novel and computer game. (A very old computer game, but I’ve heard good things.)
I would say that the bridge Trilogy was still cyberpunk - Information theft, data gasses, disgraced rentacops and couriers, all those tropes.
But the future came and rolled over the Blue Ant Trilogy to the point it was barely even Sci-fi.
And then that happened again with Agency, requiring the book to be rewitten
Hopefully it’ll fare better than Gibson’s Peripheral adaptation: well received, well reviewed, cancelled for no particular reason during the strike after Amazon had previously decided to have a second season, leaving it mid-cliffhanger.
I would rate them both as great. I read Snowcrash in one very long sitting and I don’t think I’ve done that before or since.
I wouldn’t say that tbh. It’s more like cyberpunk evolved alongside him. I definitely consider his newer stuff cyberpunk. Like back then it extrapolates current tech trends in the context of a corporate future.
And is there any purer example of the cyberpunk maxim of “high tech, low life” than the Bridge trilogy?
That is good to know. I started watching it but fell off in the middle of the season for no particular reason, but never bothered finishing it since I had read the book anyway. Now I definitely have no reason to finish.
Amazon dump the odd half decent thing they do.
Fuck you Bezos!
My daughter and I won’t forgive you for Paper Girls.
Who did the adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s The Power? Love the book. Made it half way into the first episode.
