Friday, August 19, 2011

Ramblings on Neuromancer, written in 2008


Written by William Gibson in 1984, Neuromancer is an award-winning novel set in the near future. It is a story about how technological limits have been pushed to the absolute extreme. Dark imagery and description help develop a strong feeling of paranoia and despair in this society. As a result of the pollution and decay brought about by these changes, Gibson’s world is one in which the shores are covered with “shoals of waste” (Gibson, 39) underneath a “poisoned silver sky.” (7) Societies like this, where such changes have been allowed to take place without regulation, have led to a massive disregard for the environment. Therefore, Gibson’s use of description is used primarily to develop the theme of environmental decay. The reader follows Case, the main protagonist of the story. He travels through various techno-criminal subcultures and areas where numerous instances of environmental decay can be recognized. The first three ‘parts’ of the novel, each containing several chapters, involve a separate environment through which he travels. The first area of the story is Ninsei, which is a Japanese town located in a place referred to as Night City. This is a place where drug addicts thrive and the streets are rampant with crime, overpopulation, and pollution. The second area is called BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis), which is a labyrinthine urban sprawl where many descriptions are used to highlight some dystopian ideas. Part three of the novel follows Case and his companions to a space station called Freeside. This is a place for faced paced sin and is designed to resemble Las Vegas. Although it is mostly a nice place, this area is for the most part an artificial representation of beauty. These environments all contain similar descriptions that are dystopian in nature, and the primary effect of these descriptions is to convey environmental decay.

 Part one, Chiba City Blues, introduces the reader to Henry Dorsett Case, who is living in Ninsei. The night sky above Ninsei is “the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” (3) This description introduces the bleak atmosphere surrounding the city. It also demonstrates that the environmental decay in Night City make it a very uninviting place. As Case starts to walk through the city, he notices that “the bars down in Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.” (7) This descriptions shows that things appear simply as artificial and dead, there is no beauty in this place. Since no beauty is described in this city, and only areas devoid of organic elements are focused on, it is evident that environmental decay has taken place. Case’s primary concern is making enough money to survive by making the loosest deals on the street. He is a hustler who was brutally maimed which prevented him from accessing the ‘Matrix.’ It is because of this that he is forced onto the streets to observe this mass of environmental decay, and since he and other characters do not seem to regard this decay with any concern, it is only through Gibson’s use of description that it is revealed. As Case walks around Ninsei, the people he observes appear detached from reality entirely. Arcade games, drugs, and other recreational activities seem to preoccupy their time, with absolutely no regard paid to their surrounding environment. It is also observed that Ninsei appears to be a “deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast forward button.” (7) This is clearly indicative of the fact that society has sacrificed everything for the speed and instant gratification that technology provides. The streets are cluttered with junk and waste as a result. It is later described that Ninsei is a “deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself,” (11) implying that all things associated with the negative side of technology have become prevalent, even the air quality. While out on the streets, Case notices that the air was getting worse, and that “half the crowd wore filtration masks,” (15) and that nobody seems to care about what is going on.

Part two, The Shopping Expedition, is where Case and his group travel to the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. This place is described as being a massive urban sprawl with “ferro-concrete roots” (44) and “soot-stained grid[s]” (44). The reader gets the feeling that this urban metropolis is choking under decay and dust. Even Case’s room is described as “empty… blank walls, no windows… The walls were coated with countless layers of latex paint.” (44). Case’s existence is frequented by temporary living spaces that do not seem real or significant in any way. They are just boxes with little relevance because the only thing people like him seem to care about is virtual reality and drug use. There is no focus on the environment, and thus it has been allowed to decay to the point that even living spaces are not maintained. When Case visits ‘The Finn,’ a so-called “fence for stolen goods,” the descriptions of his living quarters support the theme of environmental decay;
…dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He didn’t look back. (48)
                This passage gives the idea of eternal obsolescence from all the old decaying technology and books. If something is not cutting edge it simply collects dust and piles of into mountains of waste. In the name of progress, it is as if society has become so quick to irresponsibly discard the junk that it once found useful. The fact that this junk is entangled around ‘canyons’ and is piled in ‘mountains’ gives the reader a description of how the natural environment has started overflowing with discarded junk that continues to grow. At the end of the part, Case’s description of the area offers another glimpse at the environmental decay that has taken place;
The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete… Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries. (85)
                This description paints the Sprawl in a very bleak tone. It is undeniable that Gibson focuses on aspects of decay, rust, and death in relation to the environment to show how it has deteriorated.

Part three, Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne, takes place different space stations such as Freeside. Freeside is described at the start of the chapter;
[It is a] brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and sp. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family of inbred and most carefully refined. (101)
                This description offers the notion that although this area has not been affected by much decay, it is a place completely lacking in moral standards. While in Freeside it is as though nothing is actually real. The Sky is a recorded projection, the trees are genetically engineered, everyone has “melanin boosted” fake tans, and drug use is rampant. Freeside is a place for unrestrained hedonism, so its inhabitants routinely use drugs to forget about their problems. If one observed Freeside they would notice that massive Casino complexes dominated the landscape. There is no natural element to this area, and that is made highly apparent by the lack of any real sense of nature. Freeside was simply designed as a pillar of consumerism to satisfy its product-obsessed denizens, yet nobody seems to care about the false atmosphere surrounding them. Environmental decay takes many forms in the novel, but it is clear that Freeside is an example of it.

                Although these three areas offer a significant amount of environmental decay, other instances of it can be observed throughout the book. A society that values technology and immediacy over the natural environment is destined to destroy its surrounding environment. Even though it is a slow change, the rate of deterioration is affected by how people perceive their environment. In Neuromancer, it is clear that people are far more concerned with escaping reality than fostering it, which allows environmental decay to take place. Gibson shows this using description, and he does not paint a pretty picture. Therefore, Gibson’s use of description helps develop the theme of environmental decay.

No comments:

Post a Comment