BOOK REPORT: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Title: Neuromancer
Author:  William Gibson
Copyright Date:  1986

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars ( ok )

Back-Cover Description
The edition I have doesn't have a back-cover description so I borrowed on from Amazon:

Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same. 

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price.... 

My Thoughts
When Neuromancer was released, it was something unique and different.  At least that's what I've been told.  Unfortunately, it is twenty-five years later and the genre has grown and matured since then.  

It was difficult for me to get engaged in Neuromancer.  I simply couldn't get my reading momentum going, and as a result, it took me a long time to finish.  I can trace this back to one simple reason.  I found William Gibson's writing style very difficult to deal with.  There wasn't a rhythm to the prose at all.  There were rambling sentences describing an action scene loaded with ambiguous pronouns. Cryptic incomplete sentences littered the pages.  I often found myself confused with what was going on in a scene and constantly having to go back to reread a few pages in an attempt to make some sense of what was going on. Most of the time I just gave up and pushed ahead hoping the loose strings would miraculously join together.  More often than not, the strings would finally come together later in the chapter, but I was usually annoyed by that point.

Once I got a bit more than halfway, I wised up to the fact that there was a comprehension phase-shift and I resigned myself to just be confused most of the time.  I just read the words as they were printed and gave up on trying to comprehend the story as it went and my reading pace and enjoyment picked up.

Looking back on Neuromancer, the basic story line wasn't bad at all, I just wish it was written better. Maybe if I read it when it was released, I would have received it with an open-mind and been wowed by cyberspace enough to ignore the writing. Or maybe it's just hard to go back to a classic in this genre, especially if you didn't catch it the first time around; I was ten so I missed that spaceship.  

BOOK REPORT: God Bless You, Dr Kavorkian by Kurt Vonnegut

Title: God Bless You, Dr Kavorkian 
Author:  Kurt Vonnegut
Copyright Date:  2011

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars ( short )


Back-Cover Description
In twenty-one trips down the "the blue tunnel to the pearly gates" strapped to a gurney, Vonnegut interviews Sir Isaac Newton, Clarence Darrow, James Earl Ray, Eugene Debs, John Brown, Adolf Hitler, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout, among others. What began as a series of ninety-second interludes for WNYC public radio evolved into this provocative collection of questions and answers about who and what we live for, and how much it all matters in the end.

My Thoughts
God Bless You was a very short read.  Each account of a "visit" with a deceased person at the pearly gates was approximately three pages. Some were amusing, others were inspiring, others left me wanting.   

I found the interviews with people I was not familiar more enjoyable that the ones from people I knew about.  I think this is partly due to my expectations going into the story.  It was easy for me to simply read the interview and enjoy Vonnegut's unique take on this individual's contribution to mankind if I didn't have an preconcieved notions going into the story.  For the interviews for people I knew about, I had questions I wanted for Vonnegut to ask and discuss and he rarely came close to those topics.

Overall this was an entertaining read.  At times it was a bit predicable in its themes, but Vonnegut's witty writing makes up for any lack of depth in several of the interviews.