Gibson
James Mulholland (jsm5q@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU)
Sun, 30 Mar 1997 20:29:36 -0500
Thinking about the familiarity/strangeness that a reader can find in
Neuromancer, I was struck by Gibson's comments in the interview he did with
Larry McCaffery, particularly about his use of lingo. McCaffery (and me as
well) seemed to have an interest in trying to decipher exactly "where"
Gibson got his ideas for these very strange objects and settings, lingoes
etc. that makeup the precise details of this book. It seems really useful
that Gibson considered most of his language intelligible because it came
from the mixture of things that he had heard around him. This hybridizing
impulse that Gibson uses for his lingo, seems to be how a great deal of the
intelligbility/strangeness of the book can be decoded. For me, its the
mixture of genres, objects, ways of speaking that provides both the
familiarity/ lack of familiarity in the book. This doesn't mean that there's
nothing "new" in Neuromancer, but it seems like Gibson got to some form of
complete strangeness by bending and twisting material that he had already
seen around him. This seems true for a lot of good science fiction, and, for
me at least, also for Dark Decade.
some thoughts
James