I wanted to love Neuromancer. I knew going in that it was going to be difficult. I'd read the reviews. They all say "you're not going to have any idea what's going on in the moment but it will become clear," so I thought I was ready. The book defined a style and genre I love. It inspired games and movies I love.
I didn't love it.
Similar to Blood Meridian, I know that if I reread it a second time I would enjoy it more. I'd know what's going on and could take in the writing and characters and world building. The concept of meatspace vs. cyberspace has stuck around for the 40 years since the book was written. I enjoyed as much of that as I could while reading, but in the end I found the style and story too hard to follow for my admittedly pedestrian reading brain, and it killed a lot of the enjoyment I was hoping for.
Maybe I expected too much, or tried to push through without grasping the concepts and should have re-read certain parts over again. I even looked up chapter summaries a few times to see if I understood what had happened correctly (I batted about .500 for getting it right).
Or maybe... the book just isn't for me. I'm happy I read it, I enjoy pieces of it, it holds up incredibly well as a work of science fiction from 40 years ago. I'm open to this being down to me not getting it. But it wasn't for me.
Saved annotations
His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn't taking calls
young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting
Travel was a meat thing
Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct