Goodnight, Nebraska

Earlier I mentioned that I had picked up a book that completely drew me in after just a few pages. That book was Goodnight, Nebraska, by Tom McNeal.

The first 70-some pages of this book were incredible. I didn't want to put the thing down. McNeal's descriptive powers are outstanding and his characters, particularly his protagonist, was consistently believable and intriguing.

And then the book started to drag a little. The middle part of the narrative, which takes place in the eponymous town in the Nebraska Panhandle (the town seems to approximately replace Hay Springs, if any of you are curious and in posession of a good Nebraska map (and why would you be?)), drags a bit. In large part this is because the story turns into more a series of vignettes, and the focus on the protagonist is lost--he becomes just one of the few hundred people who call Goodnight home.

By the end, though, you realize what that means. The other residents of Goodnight, in fact, the town itself, are just as important as Randall Hunsacker. This is both a benefit and a drawback, since after about 100 pages the plot becomes unmoored and drifts around the sumptuous landscape of western Nebraska. In one sense it's the location itself that gets the best treatment in this novel.

Still, while I bogged down a bit chasing the plot, I enjoyed the story and appreciated it more after it had ended. In a large sense, the episodic nature of the story helps push the real theme, namely the repetitive and seemingly directionless nature of small town life. Most, if not all, of McNeal's characters are leading lives of (sometimes not so) quiet desperation, outwardly cheery while inside wrought with loneliness, boredom, and an unfulfilled yearning to break free and find out what else life has to offer.

Three Books

I've finished three books recently without reviewing them, and I should rectify that oversight.

First was Undestanding Arabs, which I picked up back when I thought I'd be in Iraq right now instead of whiling away the hours at work desperately waiting for something interesting to happen. It was the first of the pre-Iraq books I decided to read, and as such is also the only one I've finished so far. I can say safely even without having finished/read the other books, this is the one of the four that I would have brought with me overseas.

Obviously this isn't the sort of book you're just going to pick up and read for fun. But if you find yourself heading toward that part of the world, this book (now available in a new edition from September 2005) is basically the standard (not to say only) text on Arab culture written for Westerners. It's a great primer on dealing with Arabs on a personal level. Would that I had reason to use it.

Next up was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick. This is the novel upon which the movie Blade Runner was (loosely) based. It's a nice slim book and I took it with me during the fantastic trip to Valdosta a couple weeks ago. I read the whole book in one afternoon and another evening. I need to rent Blade Runner now and watch it again, but the differences in the two are significant.

This was a great book. I won't insult you with a synopsis since if you're reading this blog you are almost certainly well-read and well-screened enough to know how the story goes, from one source or another. If you only know the movie, and you liked the movie, you ought to pick this up. It's so much deeper, but typical of Dick it showcases a very ambiguous morality. I can't recommend this book too strongly to fans of sci-fi or dystopian fiction, though I'll admit non-fans would find many of the book's conceits a little to bizarre. Still, this is probably the best novel I've read in the past year.

And just today I finished Bill Bryson's Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. I picked this one up to take home last weekend because I wanted something ligther than the history of the middle east to read. Today I read the last two-thirds of it. Bryson is terrifically readable, funny and light and, for such a recent discovery of mine, one of my current favorites among writers. After Mother Tongue, I was really looking forward to this.

And it was light and engaging and humorous and a little sad, but it wasn't as great a read as I'd hoped--mostly because I couldn't get past Bryson's condescension toward so many of the people he met. Certainly not everyone you meet is as wise or warm or witty as yourself, but neither is everyone necessarily less so because they come from a different region or speak with a different accent. For an American, even one who when this was written had been living in England for over 12 years, Bryson comes across almost a little bit too Euro-trash, and that was disappointing.

Nonetheless, he makes some brilliant comments, especially considering that they're now over 15 years old. In particular he seems disappointed that every town in America is becoming the same--they're all Anytown U.S.A. He is disturbed by the tendency of the towns immediately abutting National Parks to become seedy tourist traps and is fairly negative toward tourist traps in general. He has some very insightful comments about the NPS' administration of the National Parks, which he sees as quite poor.

The book has been compared to Travels with Charley and Blue Highways. Not having read Blue Highways I don't know how to compare it, and Charley is almost 45 years old, so some of the insights show their age (plus I don't like poodles. Or Steinbeck). But before I started this blog, I read a book by Stephen Coonts called The Cannibal Queen. Coonts is no Steinbeck (or Least-Moon or even Bryson, frankly), but his book is perhaps the most recent version of the schlepping-through-America genre that started with de Tocqueville (who's book is still the best of the type), and to be honest with you, I like Queen better than Lost Continent. A 1941 Stearman is way cooler than any Chevette ever made, and Coonts manages to be less critical of the places he visits, possibly because as a former military man he has an easier time than Bryson looking past America's faults. While I chide this tendency in my colleagues, in print it's a much more attractive tendency than Bryson's condescension.

The Areas of My Expertise

Smitty's super-short review of John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise:

Why didn't I think of that?

And how in the hell did he think of all that?

Buy this book. Read it on the john, because you're going to laugh a lot. Really hard. And if you actually read every one of the 700 hobo names, write and tell me. That's a lot of hobo names.

No, seriously, this was really absurdly funny, and it was just the sort of thing I needed to be able to read during this period of intense and often confusing turmoil in my life. Thank you, Melinda.

Collapse

Jared Diamond’s Collapse is a long book. But societal collapse may not take a very long time at all. An interesting juxtaposition.


Let me start out by saying that this is an outstanding book. It has a handful of minor faults, most of which are of curious nature and not worth discussing (Mongolia is neither politically nor environmentally in danger of collapse; I assume he meant Nigeria, which has many of the same letters). That a book of this size and scope should have but a handful of minor faults is remarkable, and were I to write a full review of this book it would be almost entirely positive.

But time is short these days. It feels like it always is; and that’s why it took me so long to finish this book, which I started in October. Time is the one resource we must almost deplete at a constant rate, and there’s nothing at all we can do about that.

So I’ll keep this review short. What will you get if you buy this book? In the first few chapters, you’ll learn a great deal about the collapse of several ancient societies (and no, Rome is not one of them; Visigoths are not an environmental issue). These stories present lots of interesting questions and will keep you thinking long after you’ve put the book down.

Next you’ll read several chapters about collapses in more modern societies, and about the environmental problems facing certain places and how those are causing societal changes. This is an important point: Diamond is surely an environmentalist in some sense and he is surely writing from that perspective, but he is not writing about what is happening to the environment in these places (Australia, China, Rwanda) simply because the environment is pretty and full of fluffy woodland creatures; this is a deficiency of many environmentalists, the notion that we should care about the environment for the environment’s sake. What Diamond has done is show us, both in the previous chapters about ancient societies and in the ones about the present day, is that environmental degradation creates significant impacts on human society, so significant as to result in that society’s ultimate destruction.

Taking these two sections together, Diamond is showing us how societies themselves affect the environment, and how the effects those societies themselves had on their environment led to their downfall—or, in some cases, how those societies recognized and solved their environmental problems to their own benefit. This isn’t Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. Diamond is no breathless idealist. He’s simply using empirical evidence to show how societal mismanagement of the environment has significant, and often negative, impacts on society itself.

The final chapters of the book relate more general ideas about the environment and society, such as how on Earth could the Easter Islanders have been so stupid as to cut down all their trees. Diamond examines how societies fail to perceive, to understand, and to solve environmental problems. He discusses how major players in any society, be they tribal chieftains or corporate CEOs, have looked at environmental issues.

The final chapter of Collapse summarizes what Diamond sees as the largest environmental problems currently affecting society, how they are interconnected, and how they can be solved. He doesn’t propose solutions, he simply points out that all of the problems can, in fact, be solved by modern world society. But it will take sustained political will. And a part of that sustained will must come from us First Worlders, in the form of embracing a lifestyle that involves less consumption. Less consumption frequently is translated to "lower standard of living," but this need not necessarily be the case. Diamond does not get into this but I'm thinking about it and will probably post on it later.

I would love to discuss this book at length with anyone who is interested in doing so. But I must leave this review here. In summary, this is an outstanding book, one that deserves to be read by everyone. One reviewer called it "the most important book of the decade," and he may not be far off. You owe it to yourself and your children to read it. My only fear is that most Americans will likely turn their backs to Diamond's message. Jared Diamond calls himself a "cautious optimist" about the future. I hope he's right.

Arnold's Cyclopedia

I got yet another book from my local library! You should see what your library has to offer.

I checked this book out because A) I wanted some new exercises to do in the gym and the book lists pretty much every way you can lift a weight, and B) it costs like fifty bucks to buy a copy and weighs about nine pounds. My bookshelves are overloaded as it is and my checkbook is a bit underweight.

I did not read this whole book. Nor did I plan to. Nor would I bother. If you want a history of bodybuilding, it's in the book. If you want an entire workout plan for years, it's in the book. Every exercise ever conceived? In the book. Tips on competition? Yeah, it's in the book. I read the exercises. I have a few comments for those who might care.

This is the revised second edition of this book. It still offers a few exercises you should never, ever do (behind the neck chinups), but it also presents more alternatives. And, the discussion of squats and deadlifts goes much further into safety and why it's so important to keep the back straight. That's a good change.

The exercise plans are fairly absurd. Work out six times a week, hitting each body part three times? Fine, if you're on steroids. Anyone else will overtrain in a heartbeat. Then it gets better, with a plan for two workouts a day six days a week. Again, poor advice for non-roided types.
Of course, I'm not planning on using any of the workout plans in the book. I've done enough work on my own to know what works for me and I'm happy with that (although I'm less happy with the fact that I went to the gym all of once in November, and maybe four times in December). And after all, what should I have expected from a professional bodybuilder/governor (though probably not governor anymore by this time next year)?

All in all, this is a book with many ideas, only about half of which are probably crap. This is pretty good as books of ideas go. Most philosophers probably get to about 50%, if they're lucky. I'm sure my writings don't crack the 50% crap level. Marx never got anywhere near it. And, if you need to glue two things together, you can set this book on top of them.

Bartleby the Scrivener

So, I read Bartleby the Scrivener, part of this book here called The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville. I checked this book out of my local library.

If I had more time I'd probably read the other shorter novels of Herman Melville, but as it is I've been busy and I only checked this out to read Bartleby. I did this on the advice of a friend, but I no longer know how the subject came up. To be honest, I'm not sure I got Bartleby. Was there something to get? Or was I just looking for something more than was there. I guess this was just absurdism, and as such, it was an interesting read. Though I would have to argue with a few points. The coda wherein it is supposed that Bartleby worked in the dead letter office really seemed to destroy the mood. I don't know. I liked the idea of Bartleby just being impossible to figure.

That said, I like the way he controlled his situation. I'd like to see something similar happen in reality, to see how it would play out. How long could you get away with simply prefering not to do things? I'd prefer not to go to work, but I don't think I'd quite manage that as successfully as Bartleby controlled his boss.

It was interesting. And short, which is nice, since the books remaining on my reading list are both very long and have taken me a long time to read.

Freakonomics

So... I read Freakonomics, which apparently is one of the biggest nonfiction books of the year.

I didn't buy it, though, I borrowed it from a friend. It turns to be very interesting and thought provoking, but I'm not sure it's quite as amazing as a lot of folks are saying. The main problem with this book is that not everything in the world can be explained with the cold logic of economics. I like the book's premise--that we can use the tools of economics to answer all sorts of questions. I like the idea of coming up with my own questions and trying to find solutions in the same manner as the book's authors. But I am not among those who believe that all of live can ultimately reduced to algorithms. Messrs Levitt and Dubner seem to think that is possible.

I may write a longer review when I'm feeling better, but I might not. This book gets... oh, I don't know. It's probably worth a read, I mean, it is interesting. Just don't forget your salt.

Test Pattern

Okay, so I was going to go off on my next adventure (St. Pete Clay, specifically), but then Clemson put three touchdowns up on FSU and now I can't leave the television. I'll go to the studio tomorrow.
So... I guess I should write a review of Test Pattern, by Marjorie Klein, which I read while on vacation.
I picked up this book at the used book store in downtown while wandering around down there one afternoon. I also picked up several other used books, and the total bill came to something like four dollars. So as you can see, this book didn't exactly cost a bunch of money. For what I paid, it was a good book.

It was Marjorie Klein's first book; she writes for the Miami Herald and the book has a promotional blurb from Dave Barry on the cover. That's pretty high praise; I'll read anything by Barry and for the most part I'll read anything he recommends (say what you will, but I think Dave Barry's a better judge of literature than Oprah). That, and the cover of the book caught my eye. Bright yellow, with a picture of a TV dinner. The old kind of TV dinner, the kind that predated microwaves and that had those neutron peas that never seemed to warm up all the way (and seemed to exist in every compartment of the dinner whether there were peas in the dinner in the first place or not).

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but that is in reality how we judge most books, and nearly everything else as well. And I'm not disappointed in this book. It wasn't bad. It wasn't remarkably good, but it had its own charms.

The central conceit of the book is that there's more in the tv test pattern than meets the eye--at least for one little girl. The book is set in the early 1950s or very late 1940s, in the early days of television. The family at the center of the book have just acquired their very first television, and the book's theme is the effect tv has on the family. As you might expect, the effect is not exactly a good one.

Marjorie Klein has done some very amusing things here. For one, each chapter alternates between the daughter narrator, and third-person narrator following the mother. This is pretty unique; I've tried to write stories where multiple characters each get to narrate, and the reason so few people can make this work (Faulkner aside) is that it's hard to get the narrators to be convincingly individual. Here, instead of having mother narrate herself, mother's chapters are written by a third narrator, but with a very limited point of view. I've never read a book that used this tool, and I quite enjoyed it.

The father, who is a key character in the story every bit as important as mother and daughter, doesn't get to narrate. Hard to say why exactly, but there are plenty of possible reasons. We never really get into his head, but it's clear enough exactly what sort of problems he's having, with his wife, with his job, with life in general. That he doesn't suffer from not having his own chapters is clear enough indication that Marjorie Klein knows what she's doing.

As I said, it was an enjoyable read, but not one of my favorites. The test pattern bit seems...silly, and frankly insignificant, until the moment comes in the story when it actually plays a role. And then, it feels a little... I don't know. You can't call it deus ex machina, since she's set it up right from the start of the story. I guess it's just that, I never fully bought into the test pattern magic anyway. I have problems with magic in realist stories, and this is a very realist story. In fact, I almost wonder whether the magic is necessary to story at all--and until that one fateful moment late in the book where it does matter, it could almost be eliminated. So it feels as though this bit of magic is only in the book to save everybody there in that one crucial climactic moment.

That, and, there's a glaring error in the book that should have been picked up by a decent editor. At one point when snippets of The Simpsons appear in the test pattern, Lisa's name is given as "Susie." Why Susie? It's a throwaway moment and thus no commentary is intended by the name change; it's simply an error, a bizarre error to be sure, and the sort of thing that editors are paid to catch. Then again, I do watch an inordinate amount of Simpsons, since it's on twice every night as I'm cooking and eating dinner.

The main commentary in the story, about television's effect on this working-class family, is very well stated, and the book is worth reading because of that. Indeed, a lot of people who have less trouble with magic in realist stories would probably enjoy this book a great deal. As for me, it was... okay.

Savannah

Lucky for me, the last few books I've received as gifts (of which Savannah is one) have all been very good. Savannah is not the sort of book I probably would have picked up on my own, so I'm doubly glad to have got it (was it for my birthday? Or Christmas?). Thanks, Mom and Dad!

I've never read John Jakes, though I've thought about picking up Charleston once or twice. I probably will. This is a very simple little story, a fast read, but rather exciting nonetheless. The cast of characters is wide but ably drawn, and with a handful of exceptions are brought together well at the end. I read most of this book this afternoon; it's not a particularly weighty tome, but it isn't meant to be. It's the sort of thing you could read in a few days at Christmastime, and I think that's what was intended. (More after the Jump.)

The story centers around a young girl named Hattie Lester, and the family cobbled together around her. She and her mother share duties at a dried up old plantation on the outskirts of Savannah. They flee into the city to stay with a friend as Sherman's troops approach the city, and the story plays out around and through those desperate circumstances.

The book takes in over a dozen separate plot lines, which is a lot to manage. This can be a bit confusing in the early going, keeping everyone straight. Once the action moves into Savannah along with the Union army, the book picks up substantially. I'll wager you probably won't want to put it down once Gen. Sherman himself makes his appearance.

Of course, by the time you've got a third of the book left, you have a pretty good idea how it's all going to play out in the end. The question that keeps you reading is, how exactly is Jakes going to get us there? It's well worth the journey.

My main criticism would be that one of the plotlines is deemed so frightfully unimportant as to not warrant resolution at the end of the book. This little plotline seems to stem from a need to allow young Hattie to visibly irritate her relatives early on in the story; Jakes returns to it only two or three times, taking the time to flesh out a backstory on a sympathetic character, but come the end of the book the story is left open. Hopeful, but open. I question the need for it, but this is minor.

Gen. Sherman is almost sympathetic here, which is saying something because of all individuals I've studied from that era, Sherman comes the closest to having a heart of pure evil. I'm not saying I need to reevaluate my impression of him, only that Jakes has done a good job here.

This is a very charming little story, and as the Christmas season is approaching and it's coming out in paperback, it's probably worth picking up.

The Mother Tongue and Seven Samurai

I recently finished Bill Bryson's wonderful book The Mother Tongue. And, I recently watched Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, Seven Samurai.

Both are highly recommended. Of the two, the book is the more accessible; if you have an aversion to subtitles you won't enjoy the movie, but then, if you have an aversion to subtitles just grow up. I'm no big samurai movie fan, but this is one of the great movies of all time (if we believe the AFI 100 list), and is well worth watching for characterizations. Unlike modern action movies that claim descent from Seven Samurai, this movie actually has three-dimensional characters and stands as a great film apart from its action sequences. It is three hours long, but if you watched Dances With Wolves or any of the Lord of the Rings movies you should be over that.

The Mother Tongue is an extremely amusing look at where English comes from and why it is the way is. It's not exactly a linguistics textbook, but for the vast majority of us who have no particular desire to take a linguistics course, that may be a good thing. The book covers the development of English, then takes a look in separate chapters at slang, names, swearing, and numerous other topics of general interest to anyone who speaks or reads English (which is all of you). It's an extremely entertaining read, so much so as to warrant not reading it anyplace that you'd earn disapproval for laughing out loud.

Again, both are highly recommended. I would have written longer reviews because I much enjoyed both book and movie, and both gave me something to think about long after I'd finished them (how often can you say of an action flick that you were still thinking about issues it raised hours later as you went to bed?), but other matters (detailed in a post later this evening) have occupied my mind rather a bit more this afternoon.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Totally Spoiler-Free Review:


1. Well, I at least knew who wasn't the Half-Blood Prince, but I didn't guess who was.
2. This book was way, way better than Order of the Phoenix.
3. I had guessed correctly what might happen at the end of this book. I feel very smug about all this, especially given some of the theories I read.
4. Ms. Rowling has given herself a very, very big list of things to accomplish in Book 7. No wonder she said she would probably just "keep writing and writing and writing." I guess we shouldn't expect to see Book 7 before, oh, 2007. Enough time to reread all of the previous 6 beforehand.
5. It's not that this book is so much better than Neuromancer, but, you know, it took me two days to read it. As opposed to two months. I could have read it in one day if I hadn't started reading at 8'00 in the evening.
6. I now believe nearly the entire story arc of book 7 can be found in the six existing books.
7. Let's say the comments are nota spoiler-free zone, so we can feel free to talk about the book there.

Neuromancer

I have finally finished reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. It only took me, what, about two months?

Like Frankenstein and The Martian Chronicles, this was a book I didn't so much want to read as it was one that I felt I should read--because it is the first "real" cyberpunk novel. Like those other books, I was a little less than enthralled.
A not entirely negative review follows the jump.


I enjoy the "cyberpunk" genre as rule. I like detective stories and crime novels, I like dystopian fiction, and while I wouldn't call myself a sci-fi "fan," I do appreciate the genre. Cyberpunk tends to blend these things together, and I like blenders.

If I may be so bold as make some sweeping statements about cyberpunk: beyond what the Wikipedia article linked above says, there are a few other general similarities. Cyberpunk usually has a male protagonist, and a female protagonist who links up with the male, though not always sexually. This male is, at least in the outside world, usually a loser (an "anti-hero" in the literary jargon). The female is usually attractive and given over to leather and boy toys like motorcycles and skateboards; in particular she is tough and can fend for herself--but at some point in the story her feminine vulnerability will be exposed. At the end of the story, the man and the woman do not get together.
Cyberpunk endings are vague, and often dissatisfying. So is life a lot of times.
Cyberpunk's stock in trade is a fantastic but recognizeable near-future, or even present day. Like Tom Clancy, cyberpunk writers throw around a lot of jargon that they don't bother to explain. Context often takes care of this, and where it doesn't the mind is free to wander. A good cyberpunk novel introduces a lot of new concepts, and coins new terms, and some are often quite prescient.

I would like to try my hand at maybe a little cyberpunk short story sometime. The fact that Gibson knew next to nothing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer gives me hope that I could do this. But, the fact that Gibson knew next to nothing about computers also shows through in this novel, in a way that Neal Stephenson's avowed dislike of the internet did not show through in Snow Crash (which is a superior novel in most respects). The novel, written in 1984, also shows its age.

Gibson's characters are at least temporarily interesting, but if you like backstory you won't find it here, unless the backstory affects events in the current story, as with Armitage. In other words, if you like to see where characters come from and why they might react as they do, if you like a good character study, this is not your book (some readers will disagree with me; I'll get deeper into this later on). You'll learn little about the twin protagonists, less about the periphery characters. I hate to say it, but it makes it harder to care about the protagonists. The mysterious nature of their quest, and its vague morality, make it hard to care about the outcome. And when you don't care about the characters or what they're up to... well, then it takes you two months to read the book.

Still, Gibson broke some new ground here. His imagining of the Freeside space station and the necessary oddities of a rotating, cylindrical space, is close to genius. His vision of Chiba City's Ninsei enclave--and his rationale for its existence--has echoed throughout the entire cyberpunk genre. Certain scenes in the movie Hackers look like a visualization of Ninsei. I love this description of the place's existence:

But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.

I'm sure at the time Gibson thought this was a true and worthy insight. Nowadays it seems the companies at the forefront of this "burgeoning technology" are trying to shut down any potential playgrounds and keep the technology for themselves.

Gibson also managed to make a couple of contributions to the lingo--"ice" as a byword for network security, "construct" as a word for a digital entity based on a real person (think Halo), that sort of thing--but the real feat of this novel is that it was written in 1984. The internet as we know it did not exist, but Gibson came up with a plausible realization of it. His visual depiction of what the Net looked like to a hacker who had "jacked in" compares again to 1995's Hackers; note that the computer in that movie, which is depicted much like Gibson's "Net," is called "The Gibson" in his honor.

The book was ground-breaking. It more or less created, or at the least defined, a new genre of fiction. It is imaginative, fast-paced, and includes enough sex, violence, and drug use to keep even the most worldly and jaded readers interested.

Still, Neuromancer left me feeling somewhat empty. It wasn't the ending (hey, I just watched Cold Mountain; this ending was great in comparison). No, I keep coming back to the characters, to Case and Molly. Both are interesting as characters, but not interesting enough to really be worth caring about.

This may be part of the problem with cyberpunk. Anti-heroes and tough girls can be interesting because they break the mould, but if their characterizations do not go far beyond that, they don't hold your interest. Case and Molly are interesting character sketches. There's not a lot to Case--we know he's 24, that he used to be a great hacker cowboy, and that he got burned by a mega-corporation/crime syndicate (megacorps being an important aspect of this novel and this genre) for being naughty with their data. We know little else about him, and, since despite attempts to correct them he maintains his drug addictions and his impropriety, it's hard to see why we should care what really becomes of him. Case is a protagonist (unlike Cold Mountain's Inman) who's death would not sadden us. Molly has more backstory (which will be familiar to readers of Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic (though not to viewers of that film)), but her motivation--she's only doing it for the money--makes her hard to know, hard to get involved with, and hard to care about. The most interesting character in the entire story, apart the eponymous Neuromancer, is Armitage, a broken and twisted man who's backstory we get just a tantalizing hint of. But Armitage plays another role; he's more of a tool than a character, both in the sense of his role in the story and his characterization.

So how big a fault is this? Gibson was, as I said, defining a new genre, and sometimes in doing that, especially if one isn't doing it consciously (it's hard to believe Gibson wasn't conscious of it, even if it wasn't his primary intent), the genre itself, the plot and its direction, outweigh the characters. The question, after all is, "What is cyberpunk?" not "Who is cyberpunk?" Case is a shell, like Molly and, quite literally, like Armitage. These shells have been expanded on and fleshed out by later writers, and by Gibson in some of his later works. In the long run, my inability to care about Case is less important than my ability to understand what he is.

Still, this makes characters into mere tools. I don't like to think of them that way. In my own writing I've discovered that plot happens because of the characters; plot doesn't happen to the characters. Not all writers work that way; not all readers expect it. But I do. And for that, and despite all the great and interesting things about it, Neuromancer was a disappointing read.