William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
 

 1. Language: A culture of neologisms
 

 Q1: The novel generates a whole range of neologisms. What does the new vocabulary, and the manner in which it is introduced – knowing, casual, almost glibly unmindful of its novelty – accomplish as an effect on the reader?
 

 Q2: What is the significance of the Japanese flavour to many of the neologisms?
 

 Q3: What are the similarities, and differences, between the use of a private/cliquish language as invented by Burgess in A Clockwork Orange and that invented here by Gibson?
 

 Q4: How does language contribute to the various "sub-cultures" invented by Gibson in the novel?

 2. Plot: The Hunt, or Chase, or Quest motif
 

 Q1: In what sense is the plot of the novel based on the Quest motif?
 

 Q2: In what ways is the plot based on the model of the traditional Thriller or the Who-done-it?
 

 Q3: Does the plot enact the idea of a movement or progression from relative ignorance to knowledge or understanding – in the reader and/or in the protagonist?

 3. Globalization: Multi- or trans-national corporations
 

 Q1: What is the tonal register in which several variations on a futuristic and "trans-national" urban culture are presented as the context or backdrop for the plot and characterization?
 

 Q2: How would you account for the negative connotations of passages like the following: “… the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish…. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism….” (14)
 

 Q3: What is the significance of the shift in locale from Japan to "the Sprawl" to Istanbul, Paris, and then to "Zion" and "Babylon"?

 4. Digital culture, cyberspace, AI and Mind
 

 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.” (N51)

 Q1: How does the novel evoke Cyberspace?
 

 Q2: What are the values, preoccupations, and effects of a digital culture as suggested by the novel?
 

 Q3: What is AI, according to the novel? How is one to distinguish AI from Mind or Human Consciousness? What is Identity? How is it overlapping with/distinguishable from Consciousness or Mind?
 

 5. Technology, the human body, consciousness and identity

 Q1: How does the technological as a prosthetic dominate the physical culture of the novel?
 

 Q2: How does the scope for drugs and prosthetics affect identity and consciousness?

 Q3: How does the novel separate consciousness from the corporeal? What are some of the effects of such separation as dramatized by the novel?

 

 Last updated 07 October 2002

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