If you read this what would you say it means?
He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented." The Mercedes swerved, avoiding a balloon-tired dray stacked with hides. "I have followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion poised beside a brake lever.
"What you see is what you get,' yeah," the Finn said. "I seen the schematics on the guy's silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina over easy."
It’s saying that a man possesses a fake organ that can make people see things. It messes with their retinas and creates projections. There’s a further scene where the man that is being described has a spotlight aimed on him and falls down, and then his back blows up and a monster comes out. The protagonists tackle the creature and “go through it.”
I had to re read these two parts like 5 times to understand that he’s creating projections and the monster was never real. I thought maybe it meant he was a robot at first.
Anyways, I was wondering if people have had the same experience? I recently read Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe which is another fragmented sink or swim style book and I had less issues understanding it. I’m determined to stick it out. So far I’m following the plot well enough but some of these descriptions are so minimalist.
by LV3000N
5 Comments
Dude Gibson’s prose is like being thrown into a blender of tech jargon and street slang – totally normal to feel lost. That passage you quoted is peak cyberpunk mindfuckery where he just drops you into this world and expects you to figure out the rules as you go
I remember hitting that exact same section and having to backtrack multiple times because I thought the guy was literally some kind of shapeshifter or something. The whole “what you see is what you get” line from the Finn is the key though – it’s all about perception manipulation through tech implants. Gibson loves to describe these wild biotech augmentations in the most oblique way possible
Gene Wolfe is actually way more forgiving even when he’s being cryptic because there’s usually internal logic you can puzzle out. Gibson just throws you into the deep end with zero life preserver and half the terminology he made up on the spot. Stick with it though, once you get into the rhythm of his writing style the payoff is worth it and the main plot thread becomes way clearer in the second half
I was also extremely confused when I read Neuromancer. They just throw you into the universe with absolutely zero explanation. I ended up rereading the beginning after getting about 30% through and it helped
I had a similar experience… I really wanted to concretely understand what was happening. My reading experience got better, in so far as I could finish the book, when I got the advice not to take it word for word, but to rather read it for a general impression. You’ll get some things. You’ll miss others, but the world will project itself to you more so than you’ll create it in your own head by going slower. Kind of like a fever dream.
Good luck. Took me a couple years, and a few restarts, to get through all the way.
That was a confusing scene. Didn’t Molly cut him to break his concentration?
I struggle. I considered reading it again after I’d finished. First pass to understand, second to enjoy. In the end I didn’t, but I know I lost whole paragraphs to dialect I couldn’t follow. I believe there is a show or movie in the works. Looking forward to seeing how that works out.