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I don't remember much of neuromancer since I read it like 13 years ago but the opening line is good. "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Nothing fancy, but it's snappy. Good simile.
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Jan 8, 2019 05:57
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I just read the first few pages and it's clearly inspired by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It doesn't reach the heights of those two greats and is a little clumsy integrating terse descriptions with dialogue but you couldn't choose much better inspiration for genre prose.
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Jan 8, 2019 06:11
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A human heart posted:check this out: it's bad, and the opening sentence is an all time clunker. phew! What don't you like about it (the sentence)?
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Jan 8, 2019 11:10
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the words are put in an order that isn't pleasing to read and the simile falls apart if you think about it for more than 10 seconds. drat, the sky is grey just like our tv watching society. makes u think. great stuff from banksy over here
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Jan 8, 2019 12:13
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A human heart posted:the words are put in an order that isn't pleasing to read and the simile falls apart if you think about it for more than 10 seconds. drat, the sky is grey just like our tv watching society. makes u think. great stuff from banksy over here I disagree with you; but the method by which you expressed this opinion does not make me want to scream at you. How is such a thing possible? I like it. It ties the theme together in one establishment line. People, the world, and technology have blurred together; it’s all not working quite right; it was a dark and stormy night (ie this is noir flavored). An editor would offer to buy your manuscript after reading that line.
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Jan 8, 2019 14:11
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Amethyst posted:I don't remember much of neuromancer since I read it like 13 years ago but the opening line is good. "What, bright blue?"  (It's a great line, but it makes me laugh how technology's progression has made it less clearly evocative to modern readers.)
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Jan 8, 2019 14:19
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It means that it's snowing. That's what that line means
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Jan 8, 2019 15:36
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The sky above the port was black, with a big banner that said NO INPUT - HDMI 2
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Jan 8, 2019 16:12
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The sky above the port kept switching through beautiful pictures of Swiss castles other stock landscape images because my parents couldn’t figure out how to make it work
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Jan 8, 2019 16:36
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In fact it's the comma that makes it terrible. but actually
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Jan 8, 2019 17:04
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Jan 8, 2019 17:53
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porfiria posted:Ummmmm, anyway, how do we feel about Neuromancer? I read it a long time ago and while it's certainly prescient in many ways I also remember the story being dull and the characters being rather thin? The writing is definitely clunky in parts, and it suffers more than a little from leaning on the ubiquity of certain technologies that have since vanished (forget "tuned to a dead channel," there's a spine-chilling scene later on involving a row of payphones). The actual cause and effect of the plot is poorly conveyed and the ultimate mystery of the story is one that you cannot figure out from the evidence. All that being said, the thread was talking earlier about how there's very little of the genuine fantastic in genre books. For all it's shortcomings, Neuromancer is the rare story that actual has a bit of it.
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Jan 8, 2019 19:07
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Iirc, the line is a reference to the industrial lights that illuminate that entire lovely slum/dock/red light district. Has anyone else read "The Peripheral"? A Gibson novel from just a few years ago? He sets it in a slightly future USA. Lots of white rural poverty, it had something like Walmarts transitioning into a 3d printer hub.
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Jan 8, 2019 19:27
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poisonpill posted:If you sold them to a secondhand bookshop then you went from victim to victimizer I am a monster - though I donated them to a charity shop so at least I didn't profit from the horror.
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Jan 8, 2019 20:07
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EmptyVessel posted:I am a monster - though I donated them to a charity shop so at least I didn't profit from the horror. Neither did Ted Bundy.
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Jan 8, 2019 20:19
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Amethyst posted:Now I want to read it It's on Google Books. I found it by following a Wikipedia citation on how the Centerba liqueur (140 proof!) was also sold as a topical disinfectant
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Jan 8, 2019 20:25
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Schwarzwald posted:The writing is definitely clunky in parts, and it suffers more than a little from leaning on the ubiquity of certain technologies that have since vanished (forget "tuned to a dead channel," there's a spine-chilling scene later on involving a row of payphones). This has never bothered me because it makes the assumption that the world of Neuromancer (and any story with outdated real-world technology) is necessarily in the future of our world. It isn't, it's a created world that exists in a continuity that is not this one. In this reality payphones never went out of style, maybe the mobile phone was never invented. It isn't supposed to predict the future, but it does make a statement about how someone in the 1980s thought about the future. The pay phones are pretty funny now tbf
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Jan 8, 2019 20:30
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Neither did Ted Bundy. Enjoyment of one's work can be considered a profit.
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Jan 8, 2019 20:47
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Schwarzwald posted:The writing is definitely clunky in parts, and it suffers more than a little from leaning on the ubiquity of certain technologies that have since vanished (forget "tuned to a dead channel," there's a spine-chilling scene later on involving a row of payphones). The actual cause and effect of the plot is poorly conveyed and the ultimate mystery of the story is one that you cannot figure out from the evidence. this is like saying Alien suffers because all the spaceships have old 70s-era computer interfaces in them
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Jan 8, 2019 20:54
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Morte d’Arthur is bad because it’s genre and they have stirrups anachronistically
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Jan 8, 2019 21:01
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poisonpill posted:Morte d’Arthur is bad because it’s genre and they have stirrups anachronistically I've often thought that interpretations of Arthurian legend that embrace the supernatural and anachronistic weirdness are preferable to more "historical"/"grounded" takes (especially because a lot of those supposedly historical interpretations, like the 2004 King Arthur movie, are actually full of historical errors). It's interesting to reflect that Morte d'Arthur is in some respects a more "grounded" take than the French romances it's adapting, especially in terms of geography; Malory tends to place events in actual specific locations in the British Isles, while the French writers tended to be vaguer about geography. I've sometimes thought that the British Isles seem too small to fit all the "canonical" Arthurian stories and still leave room for others (how many lords who don't acknowledge Arthur's authority, lands under strange enchantments, etc. can there be?), although that might at least partly be a case of modern technology distorting my sense of distance.
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Jan 8, 2019 22:06
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I'm not saying the book is illlegible because no one can guess what mysterious object this "row of payphones" might be, and I'm not blaming Gibson for not adequately foretelling the future. I just think such anachronisms, especially when they're given heavy focus, make a given scene less effective in the modern context then they were originally. Although for real no one under 28 has any clue what a payphone is.
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Jan 8, 2019 22:25
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I really enjoyed Neuromancer and its style. My biggest obstacle to comprehension was that he often had characters do things and only explain why they did it later
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Jan 8, 2019 22:31
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A human heart posted:the words are put in an order that isn't pleasing to read and the simile falls apart if you think about it for more than 10 seconds. drat, the sky is grey just like our tv watching society. makes u think. great stuff from banksy over here It does so much with one line though. It establishes a setting, sets a mood, gives a sense of what the subject matter will be. I don't know what you're looking for.
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Jan 9, 2019 00:13
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if it didnt sound terrible that would help
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Jan 9, 2019 01:23
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I think maybe it could be constructed better. How would you express that simile and have it flow nicely? i'm trying but I can't improve it, someone with prose skills please help
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Jan 9, 2019 01:28
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Like I think you're getting at something with "the words aren't in a pleasing order" and "it sounds terrible" but i'd like to hear precisely why. Someone who knows about dactyls and poo poo needs to help me
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Jan 9, 2019 01:29
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Can someone post some excellent descriptive prose to compare it to?
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Jan 9, 2019 01:54
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once more: that comma should not be there. getting rid of it would do wonders though really he just should've wrote static
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Jan 9, 2019 02:09
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written
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Jan 9, 2019 02:11
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Lex Neville posted:once more: that comma should not be there. getting rid of it would do wonders
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Jan 9, 2019 02:12
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"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." "The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel." Hmmm is that an improvement? I can't tell anymore
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Jan 9, 2019 02:16
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Amethyst posted:Can someone post some excellent descriptive prose to compare it to? "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." In all seriousness, opening a work with a weather report is never the best option. It smacks of someone who'd rather be writing a screenplay than a novel, (although, obviously, examples predate film) If you can't start with a character doing something or at least wanting something, at least describe something more important than the sky: (real example) "Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow."
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Jan 9, 2019 02:18
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It's a problem so much genre fiction is basically cinema, yeah.
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Jan 9, 2019 02:22
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Sham bam bamina! posted:written You got me. Amethyst posted:"Television tuned to a dead channel" is cooler and more evocative than "static" I get what you're saying and I don't entirely disagree, but it does read like a tip-of-the-tongue workaround for me. Amethyst posted:"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Grammatically, there is no reason whatsoever to put that comma there. In fact, I'd lean towards it being incorrect as the information that follows is essential. But yeah, personally, I do think the cadence is much smoother without it. Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Jan 9, 2019 |
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Jan 9, 2019 02:25
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The comma, is bad.
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Jan 9, 2019 02:33
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i'm reading neuromancer for the first time right now and the prose is fantastic compared to donaldson (or sanderson or rothfuss), i don't expect heartbreaking beauty from a sff novel and as a work it has other flaws but so far i do like the writing
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Jan 9, 2019 02:36
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Here's a good opening sentence: "Telephones exist for breaking all kinds of bad news."
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Jan 9, 2019 02:38
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Cinema-influenced prose is definitely tired, but I think it can still be done well. I said gibson's prose is influenced by chandler. check out the first line of the big sleep: 
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Jan 9, 2019 02:39
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"Cinema-influenced prose" peaked decades before cinema's invention, with the opening of Bleak House.
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Jan 9, 2019 02:46
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