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Comment by InternetOfStuff

7 years ago

Well, Neuromancer's first line doesn't make sense any more :-P

That said, it's one of my favourite books.

14 comments

InternetOfStuff

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mistersquid  7 years ago

I realize you say this somewhat in jest, but I want to respond to this because the first sentence of of William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ is paradoxically both timeless and time bound.

> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That first sentence characterizes the novel's diegetic (in-narrative) setting by giving the sky a property of an alternate medium (television). Unlike gentler rhetorical assertions such as simile, the declaration that the sky possessed a property of television suggests that the setting--like the intra-diegetic setting of the (Morrocan) beach in which an unnamed adversarial AI imprisons Case--is also a media construct in which the reader is imprisoned.

In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion.

However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live".

A useful point of comparison can be found in William Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ (II.VII.139-143)

  All the world’s a stage,
  And all the men and women merely players;
  They have their exits and their entrances,
  And one man in his time plays many parts,
  His acts being seven ages. [. . .]

The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage. On the other hand, the description is also time bound (as well as culturally circumscribed) depending as it does on the greatly diminished (since Elizabethan England) medium of live performance.

EDIT: Fix predicate in first sentence. Formatting. Change "at" to "a" in penultimate sentence.

  • InternetOfStuff  7 years ago

    > That first sentence characterizes the novel's diegetic (in-narrative) setting by giving the sky a property of an alternate medium (television). Unlike gentler rhetorical assertions such as simile, the declaration that the sky possessed a property of television suggests that the setting--like the intra-diegetic setting of the (Morrocan) beach in which an unnamed adversarial AI imprisons Case--is also a media construct in which the reader is imprisoned.

    That's a very interesting take. I never took it to have such a deep meaning, I took it rather at face value (and its face-value-interptretation if you will): that is was visual white noise (vaguely like driving into the snow at night, perhaps?). I took the metaphorical meaning to be that the sky was indistinct, somehow pointless (like watching no channel), conjuring up bleakness and futility.

    In other words, I took it to be a device to transport ambience, not structural meaning.

    > In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion.

    Interesting. I had meant to re-read it anyway. I shall pay attention to your perspective, see how it shifts my perspective of the rest of the book.

    > However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live".

    To my kids, a "dead channel" would look uniformly blue.

    Or like a 404 page perhaps, these day :-D

    > The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage.

    I feel you might be you're over-thinking it there, in the sense that the actors in a TV show wouldn't be seeing static. Only viewers would.

    Thanks for sharing your perspective, I found it really interesting.

  • taeric  7 years ago

    I think the point is that my children will likely never know what a television tuned to a dead channel looks like. I've almost forgotten, myself.

    I say that as someone that finds that line rather nice.

bitwize  7 years ago

It didn't really make sense then either. No sky looks like television static. Jeff Minter's Polybius game pokes fun at it by showing the text "The sky was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel" -- before thrusting you into a level that literally had a static sky.

  • InternetOfStuff  7 years ago

    > It didn't really make sense then either. No sky looks like television static.

    If you'd like to be literal about it, dense snowfall, perhaps?

    Anyway, the point, I think, was that it shouldn't look like any sky today, but rather like a futuristic sky.