1) What is the importance of gender preference and what does it mean?

"I want a cubicle," he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a
terminal on her lap. "Lower level." He handed her his chip.
"Gender preference?" She passed the chip across a glass plate on the
face of the terminal.
"Female," he said automatically.
"Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn't satisfactory. You can
access our special services display beforehand, if you like." She smiled.
She returned his chip.
An elevator slid open behind her.

2) What's the importance of logo's in this futuristic world? How is the brand affected through the matrix world and the mediated world? ex. TA, Sensa/net, Intercontinental.

bt

bt

1) What with all this talk about nerve splicing, chip upgrades to the body, and jacking into the network directly through one's body, I found it really interesting that Molly had the scalpels under her nails because it was such a physical enhancement to her body. It didn't serve as a way for her to connect to a network or anything. Is that sort of procedure pretty common in the world, or is that pretty rare?
(Gibson, 25)

2) When Case and Molly are discussing the Dixie Flatline's construct, it reminded me of the discussion we had in class about how perhaps one day humans could be stripped from their flesh and put into machines as entire personalities and entities. Later on, we learn that what remains of the Dixie Flatline seems to run more along the lines of something akin to a personality and skills. How close to being a real "person" is this thing?
(Gibson, 49, 78)

3) I find it interesting that Case is, in some ways, stealing from his employer again. It's not really money this time around, but digging around into the private files of Armitage can't be much better than what he did the first time. While he may have a few allies on his side this time, I'm wondering if his actions will come back to haunt him or if it's the right course of action this time around.
(Gibson, 73)

~Grace

1. On p. 6, Case's flesh is described as a "prison," and right before that, Case's illness is compared to the Fall.

2. On p. 25, Molly says, "sometimes I do hur people, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired." It seems that by explaining her tendencies due to the way she is "wired," Molly creates a machine-like self, performing whatever task comes her way, with little actual thought involved.

3. It is interesting that cyberspace is described as a "consensual hallucination." Interesting isn't the right word- I think I would actually say scary. This is especially due to the fact that cyberspace is becoming such a real part of our lives, though it is inherently intangible. Cyberspace's lack of physical substance does not deny its material power (51).

-Hallie

The thing that initially struck me the most the first time I read Neuromancer were all the references to addiction. Chiba (which coincidentally is also slang for Mexican brown tar heroin) is full of drug addicts and alcoholics and when we first meet Case, he's just another example of Underworld scum.

But as soon as he is "repaired" - I can't really think of a better word - we get an insight into why he got so low. "Jacking in" provides a rush and a freedom all its own and we get to see what Case can really do.

The cyborg sentiment of the book is never addressed directly, it doesn't need to be. But reading this twenty years later, it comes of like a Jules Verne or HG Wells novel; it comes off as "futuristic quaint" - of the predictions it made, some came true (sorta) and others did not. In fact, much of our current technology is beyond what is in the book, and the book seems to take place toward either the end of this century or early in the next. The refernences to war are obscure, and I can't remember if it ever gets explained, but it seems the US lost to Japan and has been renamed "the Sprawl".

-Sickboy Trevor

Trevor Wallace,
t_rev2323@yahoo.com

I really just wanted to focus on some quotes:
1. “’Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…’” Is this what cyberspace is today?

2. “It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under Molly’s shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke.” Case is addicted to cyberspace, here a “rainbow maze” how does this relate to our interactions with the internet?

3. “Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine. Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given…” This image of ice often comes up with neurons/cyberspace. Since the name of the book is Nueromancer I think its important to find what connections there are.

Holly Groening

1) Gibson seems to expand on the idea of flesh as the cell that imprisons Case in descriptions of where he lives. Just before he is chased by Molly, he is seen checking into the Motel to his "coffin." Is this to further play out the fact that he is more alive in the virtual reality of the matrix than he is in the "meat" world?

2) When Molly gets an upgrade, Case is able to become a "rider" on her and see her interact in the real world while he is jacked in. I find it interesting that in this virtual world, where you must jack in, they have found ways to conversely jack into the real world. The need to reenter the earthly world while still being jacked in seems odd since they wish to remain jacked in.

G. David Nerio

1. Case's adventures in the matrix are often presented as if they contained some level of spatiality and physicality - the '80s fantasy derived from VR helmets and gloves. This form of communication seems like a distant fiction in relation to today's world. Will we ever advance to a point where we truly need a virtual spatial world that replaces our own?

2. On page 72, the AI the Finn discusses with Case and Molly has "limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53." What are the political implications of artificial intelligence? If an AI is indistinguishable from a human, is it a human for all intensive purposes?

3. Gibson frequently juxtaposes the matrix and technology in general with erotic images or moods. Why does he do this? Is it because Case has an almost libidinal desire for technology? Is Gibson trying to make a statement with this, saying that we treat technology as a fetish?

1. What is the significance of Julius Deane's age? Is he supposed to show how unnatural the old ways were--wearing suits from 100 years ago (that look like it anyway) but having to go through such an unnatural process just to exist?

2. "He'd lived so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd almost forgoten what real fear was." I wonder if Gibson is trying to show how the influence of drugs is morel like the virtual world than real life. How the pill "lights his circuits."

3. I suppose that the rush he's getting from the chase for his life and little points like pills "lighting his circuits" definitely allude to the synthesis of man and tech that's going on, but isn't this rush he's feeling human?

1. "In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshit, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh" (6). How much different is the meat and metal?

2. "...his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix..." (33). Gibson relates a human phenomenon to a technological creation.

3. It's interesting to read about Gibson's thoughts on what he believes the future will be like.

1. At the bottom of page 10, they talk about the black clinic and a person who expensive technology would eventually wind up in one. I started thinking of the difference between our black organ market, and their black market for microprocessors. In their world, the technology that is embedded in them is required just like we need our organs in our world.

2. On page 25, Molly says "I guess it's just the way I'm wired." I started to think about how she meant that. Is her technologically programed to hurt someone, or is it her biological way? It is this discrepancy between meat and metal that I don't know which she is referring to.

3. At the top of page 18, Case is experiencing a fear that he hasn't felt in a long time. He has spent so much time in cyberspace that he no longer knows what his physical feelings are. It made me think that if we are headed to a type of society that we are mostly 'metal' will we forget our true feelings that define us as human beings in our society today (aka love, compassion...)?

- Mackenzie

1)"For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh." (6)

2) I think it's interesting Gibson chose to make Case a cowboy. I actually think a lot of similarities between the "cyberspace cowboy" and the cowboy of the American frontier can be found.

3)"He realized that the galsses were sugircally inset, sealing her sockets." (24) There seem to be so many extremes of "meat + metal" throughout Neuromancer. Could it happen?

1) "Case's virus has bored a window through the library's command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon" (63). I think this idea of the internet/matrix as a medium with computing structures (such as firewalls etc) represented as visual objects is kind of an archaic futuristic prediction, akin to flying cars. It doesn't seem to be that the world wide network is really moving in that kind of direction, but the visual imagery Case's expeditions through cyberspace are interesting.

2) "Entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly" (58). What would enable this rate of social dynamic? What allows subcultures in this book to arise and vanish so quickly?

3) What is Gibson's purpose with the use religious overtones throughout the book - "Christian scientists" (77) "Sons of Christ the King satellite" (60) "militant Christian fundamentalists" (61) and "McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of Cyberspace..." (78)?

1) p10 "M-G employeees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic." Does this seem eerily possible to anyone else? I feel like corporations are not far off from being the loyalty-demanding, world-economy-controlling zaibatsu juggernauts Gibson envisions.

2) p11 "...he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for it's inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself." Are there analogous outlaw zones in our world for technology to flourish (the only somewhat related I can think of right now is the hacker underground, and I'm not sure if that counts)? The military is one big mover and shaker in technology; the streets could well become the other.

3) In the Eighties, especially within the so-called cyberpunk movement, there was a fascination with human-machine interfacing (jacking in, a la this book or more recently, the Matrix). Today that seems unlikely to me, that tech will go in that direction.

Ajai Raj