Neuromancer

Neuromancer moves from different cities, neighborhoods, unknown places almost every other page. We can recognize just after reading the first chapter. The novel starts out in Night City where he reflects on wishing he stilled lived in cyberspace. The novel than turns to Case’s memory of life in cyber space when he was 22. It turns back to Case being in Chiba and then begins to describe Tokyo Bay, “…where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white Styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies…(p. 7).” Case then travels west of ‘Chat’ (a neighborhood) and into a teashop. The story then flashes backs to an Arcade where Case met Linda Lee. Clearly, William Gibson’s story Neuromancer change in geography is quite frequent. While reading I was able to count nineteen different changes in location, the reasoning for Gibson’s quick change in geography I am not yet sure.

While changing settings so often Gibson does give the reader very descriptive descriptions of the places he describes. For example when he telling us about Julius Daniels offices, “Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive imitation-rosewood door to the lft of the bookcase. Julius Deane import export was lettered across the plastic peeling self-adhesive capitals (pg.13).” Although I was often confused between Gibson’s quick switching of setting I was indulged by his great use of description. When describing cyberspace he uses a memory of who he was at the time, “He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodies consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix (pg. 5).” He goes on to tell us that he really is no one here in Night City. I think he compares not settings but who he is when he is in either cyberspace or externalspaces. Again, with Gibson’s descriptive strength we can get a feel for what cyberspace was like for Case.