Highlights from Neuromancer by William Gibson Last read on August 24, 2021
Highlights from this book
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
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A middleman's business is to make himself a necessary evil.
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When the fear came, it was like a half forgotten friend. Not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex paranoia, but simple animal fear. He'd lived so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was.
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There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self concisouness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent.
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In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension.
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In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of grey paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessles, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of timelapse photograhpy took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.
In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier Ashpool neatly embossed on its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked there.
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He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure.
The rage.
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For thousands of years men have dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.
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To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to know the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names...
A Turing code's not your name.
Neuromancer.
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She'd seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool and the other children -- aside from 3Jane -- she'd refused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter.
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Neuromancer, foremost, was a shout in the night that was the 1980s, is the 1990s, and will be, it seems to me, the decades to come.
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Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.
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(Commentary) In every generation, there's room enough in the American popular mind to admit only one science fiction writer. Bradbury, Asimov, "the guy who writes Star Trek / Wars". Gibson transcended that role almost at once. In attaining a cultural summit of another order, he outmaneuvered this cultural narrowcasting in a way that might have been imagined but never predicted by anyone.
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(Commentary) All fiction is a personal reinterpretation of a writer's existence during the time the fiction was written. Therefore science fiction has never predicted with accuracy, save through coincidence.
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(Commentary) Gibson first apprehended the shape of things to come. He saw the writing on the wall, the blood in the sky, the warning in the entrails... Now lets be Heisenbergian about this. What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?
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(Commentary) Cyberspace was born where the laurel grows lush and verdant; where the dogwoods blossom and the whipperwools cry in the wind whipped limbs of the tulip trees. It was born between the ridges, deep in the glades where streams rush cold along their limestone courses; born high on the mountainside not yet stripmined for coal, atop the long green knobs of mars. The southern highlands, this was once called. We call it Appalapachia.
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(Commentary) When the past is always with you, it may well be present. And if it is present, it will be future as well.