Neuromancer Setting

As I was reading neuromancer, I remembered to recall the first sentence of the book because it lays out a sort of theme to the book. However, I think the first page overall, (page 3) gives an overview about where the setting takes place. While reading this, I captured the various cues that made it clear that this story’s beginning is taking place in Japan. These cues that I noticed were, the bars name, Chatsubo, the direct reference to Japanese words, and the draft beer Kirin that is a originated from Japan. This first page helped to jump start the reader into being involved with the surroundings and it allowed me to relate places and concepts that I knew to the real thing. By using these direct words, the setting is vivid and prevents a lot of confusion.

Another passage is when the author starts to describe Case, our main character. This sets up how the character himself relates to the book as a whole, where we see references to the “matrix” giving us the idea that this is talking about the future and how the computer world is taking over. His character sets up the story quite well, but Gibson uses new ideas, since this book was written in the past about the future, that seem to hold different meanings from what we think about today. In a sense, the movie of the matrix gives us a picture of how this book flows, but obviously they are not going into an alternate world created by computers, but more in the sense of the World Wide Web being a place where opportunities are endless. The reader learns in the first chapter that Case was considered a “cowboy” of the Internet world, and this caused him to get into serious trouble that severely injured his abilities and is searching for a way to get them back.

While the book progresses, we see the title of the place he starts out in is called “Night City”, helping us think of a place that is frozen in perpetual darkness. Through his initial ventures through this city, the setting gets set up where he will obtain his abilities and wreak some cyberspace damage. Gibson uses a extremely imaginative view of the future in order to create this story and the setting he surrounds this book on. Even though the beginning only shows a portion of where they will be, we see that the first sentence is an image that we should keep throughout the whole book, since the sky is enormous and vast.