Neuromancer Setting

In his novel, Neuromancer,  Gibson intricately describes the setting of all the scenes using very dark imagery and enveloping his surroundings in a kind of cloudy fog of description.  “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.  Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market” (page 7). The main character, Case, is introduced in this city that never sleeps, and is constantly hustling its inhabitants, the night sky illuminated by neon lights and holograms.

Gibson repeatedly points out the grey sky and how it looks like a television tuned to a dead channel; blurring the lines between reality and the drug-induced environment Case is constantly being shifted into. “Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass...the endless stream of faces recapitulat[ing] the stages of his life...Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics” (page 46).  Gibson keenly drops the reader into busy scenes, and in a rush of quick darting images-- like a movie montage showing brief bursts of detail-- the setting is built up in layers, clouded by the smoke and haze of nocturnal city.

In the midsts of the city Case finds himself in an underground fight club, where people are betting and watching a knife-fight, and hologram projections on the screen above.    “The  crowd, the tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome...No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below.  Strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome” (page 36).  Gibson has a way of creating almost surrealistic scenes by illuminating specific details of the city and giving the reader a sense of being inside the fighting arena, being bombarded with sensory images as if your eyes were jetting from one detail to the next in quick succession.