Neuromancer All

"The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel" (1)

"And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Catle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks form the wall of a skyscraper canyon." (8)

"He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction." (9) see also House of Mirth, Long Days Journey into Night.

"But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technlogies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitant, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground of technology itself (11) see also Gravity's Rainbow, White Noise.

"in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market" (17)

"We invented you in Siberia, Case...I was there when they invented your kind...You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside." (29)

Book is defined by newness. The form is intended to teach and tease at once. It is always an introduction to the world, a lesson in the world itself. The form of speculative fiction thus allows us to play in a world of new radical possibilities, but only as an outsider with one foot in the traditional, the known. We play, as such, reactionaries or sycophants, either at a worried remove or throwing ourselves full bore into the learning.

Environment:

"Home...Program a map to display frequency of data exchanged, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. You map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain block in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta." (43)

"Armitage...a conservative amalgam of the past decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask." (45)

"The mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification" (46).

"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games" said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals..."Cyperspace. 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 of constellations of data. LIke city lights, receding..." (52)

"the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. " (54)

"she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living." (55)

"entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly...random acts of surreal violence...the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent" (57) see also Armies of the Night, White Noise.

"There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of variou sshort-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals...The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists" (58)

"This deal's rel big, looks to me. We're out where the little waves are too broad, we can't see the rock that hit the center. We know something's there, but not why. I wanna know why." (92)

"They don't make much of a difference between state, you know? [He] tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry" (104)

"Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity...Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass...A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube...the gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere , and detached itself from the cube." (112-3)

117-8 Wintermute entity stuff

"Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind...You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing" (165)

168 Wintermute's missing center.

"Power...meant corporate power...Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality...T-A was an atavism, a clan...the soiled humanity." (196)

"It's not just a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of a personality" (201)

"It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few second, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero" (205)

Hive, swarm stuff (220)

"I am the dead, and their land" (235) Neuromancer himself.

"To live here is to live. There is no difference" (249) in the virtual world.

259 Conclusions