This novel continues to be one of my favorite books i have ever read. not only are things fantastic and imaginative, but they are within the realm of plausible. the book takes place in the future, but not a future that is too far away. it is easy to see how the world might end up like that in the next 15 to 20 years, or perhaps even sooner.
my favorite aspect of the book is its depth. even after reading it several times, there are still things in the book i dont fuly understand or comprehend. i find that as my mind expands...so does my understanding of this complex story. many novels are over one thousand pages long, but can easily be explained in one or two sentences. nueromancer is a little under 300 pages, and yet i could easily wright over 100 pages of my thoughts about the novel. that is something only a truly brilliant book can acomplish.
the characters are realistic. they do not adhere to typical archetypes that have flooded the sci-fi genre, nor do they fit into any kind of stereotypes brought on by modern culture. there are nood good guys or bad guys. the cast is comprised of mostly criminals, whose moral code has been skewed from the beggining of the book. but even though they do not adhere to socioties moral standpoints, thaat does not mean they are bad people. in fact no person can be labeled as good or evil in this book. some people go out of their way to do the right thing, while still being under the influence of blackmail and extortion. Case...our unwitting hero, has no intention of doing anything good up untill the last few pages, he is just doing what he wants for himself. he has no lofty goal of saving people...he just wants to save himself and make money in the process. it is unfair to say he hasnt changed by th end of the book, simply because a novel isnt an end-all summary of morality. peopel can go through great odeals, and in the end can come out the same as they were. case come out with nothing ore than a set of skills he lacked at the beginning, and the knowledge of what has passed. he wont go on to use his computer skills to save lives, he will use them to steal and make money. all i am really saying, is that in the end, everythign changed, but not in the typical fairy tail novel ending.
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2 comments:
Well, If we we're to consider the novel about Case, which it mainly is, then nothing has changed. Sure the whole freakin world has changed, with the fusion of AI's and all the other nonsense, but in the end Case actively chose to disregard everything he had learned about himself and the nature of things and show no growth through the process, just a couple new organs and a fixed nervous system. That is a definition of poor character development, which is suprising because of how good the characters were up until that point (especially Molly, easily one of the best characters in Sci-Fi history).
I definetly agree with a lot of what you are saying. I think that while I didn't understand the book too much, I can still appreciate how revolutionarily different these characters are. It may have taken time, but even the most inward, narcistic characters begin to show a little compassion. Certainly gives me some insights to my own righting- but that's a whole different story... Sorry, now I sound narcistic
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