Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson

So much of cyberpunk attempts to ape Gibson's style without realizing what makes it so special. Blade Runner is set in a broken world of dark grays and synthetic food. No sunlight, fake humans, broken society. The Matrix is a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic in which human life has been all but extinguished, taken over by humorless robots. Cyberpunk media nowadays often depicts human society on death's doorstep, hanging on by a thread. The world, and, by extension, its rulers—our human species—are already dead. We just don't know it yet.

William Gibson may be a cynical bastard, his bleak outlook sometimes bordering on dark humor, but his world is anything but dead. On the contrary, it's packed so full to the brim of living, writhing humanity that it jumps out at you on nearly every page.

He remembered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

This isn't the romantic life-begets-life, happy-go-lucky style of humanity, but the Dostoyevskian irrationality of the human animal on full display. Gibson's characters are hopeless drug addicts, violent malcontents, sexual deviants, empty shells filled with emotional scar tissue. But through all of this, they're intensely human. They're equal parts numbness and societal ennui as they are emotionally wild, angry, lustful. They make poor financial decisions on a whim, they get high before a big job with full knowledge that the comedown will affect their capabilities, they become emotional and, by extension, reckless; which puts them in great danger. Neuromancer bleeds humanity—a special sort of irony for a science fiction novel about the activities of an artificial intelligence, and one which was penned in the 1980s. And so much of what makes this novel special for me is an all-powerful artificial intelligence being faced with such irrationality. It's brilliant and impactful and caused a lengthy bout of introspection for me in which I identified certain episodes of my life in which I, myself, had acted so irrationally.

As unpredictable as the human animal is, the end tally of all of our actions often seem angled toward the same goal: Happiness. Fleeting as it is, impossible as our chase for sustained contentedness might be, we still reach for it. With hard drugs the night before a big job, with lustful, meaningless sex, with pointless consumerism.

Gibson's world is special in its richness, density, texture, and the layers present in each new locale our dirty, globe-hopping "protagonists" set foot: There's new tech on top of slightly out of date tech on top of corrugated iron, rust, broken pipes, and dirt which seem as if they're relics of the 19th century. Gibson's gift for layering his world is readily apparent and his scene-setting opening paragraphs are exquisite and unforgettable. His admirable quality as a writer of prose only enhances the impact of such stage-setting. It's a pleasure slipping into Gibson's world, and such is certainly why this novel continues to remain popular decades after its publishing.

The grungey hipsterism this book constantly displays is fully campy, almost corny, but somehow it all works. There's such an original feel represented by this world, its characters, and this plot. It's quite unlike anything else, science fiction or otherwise. Neuromancer deals with technology slipping its lead and running amok, and it deals with humanity's betrayal of itself through its own irrationality. The prescience of the former made it a noteworthy science fiction novel on its release; the latter makes a continually impactful work that is still widely read and enjoyed to this day.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Raymond Carver

It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

As I made clear in my review for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, I love Raymond Carver.

What he does is like magic. His combination of a compelling scene, genuine characters, and gruff voice always seem to come together as a sum more than their parts. It's amazing to me he can pack so much emotional payoff in sometimes as little as just ten pages, and using such spare prose. He's a master of subtlety; a master of the craft who's able to impart big feeling is small action and with few words.

This collection of short stories sees Carver regularly rely on the common motif of broken relationships. Right off the bat, Why Don't You Dance? is a great example of this, fashioning a poignant narrative on the life cycle of relationships in typically spare prose over a short length that has the same impact of stories exponentially longer. The majority of the stories present in this collection take place in and around the ruins and the downslide of relationships that are doomed to fail, or have already. These are something all adults have experienced at least once in their lives, and they have always left their mark on us and changed us somehow. Thus the experience of reading them hits all the more harder. Carver's characters are not good people; they're lazy, incompetent, petty, and bitter. But we can relate to that, too, because—if we're being honest with ourselves—we've all experienced such character flaws in ourselves, just like we've experienced doomed and broken relationships.

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

Some of the images Carver creates here are far more striking than anything I recall in his previous collection (such as a boy seeing his mother kissing a man 'with the television going' while spying through a window, a mentally disabled man and his attachment to his bass pond, and others). He also has a penchant for disarming the reader with his subtle, everyday depictions of working class life, only to hit them with a burst of unexpected violence or tragedy near the end of the stories.

Carver's brilliant and this is masterful work. The best fiction is that which turns a mirror toward us, forcing us to admit to ourselves our flaws and idiosyncrasies, and become better, more self-aware people, and Raymond Carver's collections of short stories do just that.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1937) by Ernest Hemingway

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

There's so much to like in this book. Hemingway's writing is genuine; his knowledge feels authentic and he's choosing to depict a conflict that doesn't receive much attention, despite its outcome dictating the next several decades of Spanish history. The Spanish Civil War is viewed by many as a tragic lost cause, but the nuance present in both sides and the greater global conflict that was simmering at the time provides an intensely fertile ground for morally gray characters and factions and timeless, enthralling storytelling. The questions asked by this book are numerous, and nearly all of them are compelling: Is the lesser of two evils really worth fighting for, even if it means you're essentially fighting for evil? Which types of people would choose to fight, and which would abstain? Do two wrongs make a right? When, if ever, is it acceptable to answer atrocity with atrocity? How do human beings act and think when faced with death?

Hemingway's depiction of guerrilla warfare seems so authentic. There's a hurry-up-and-wait structure to the entire book that seems appropriate to what I understand of military campaigns, the popular adage that war is ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent sheer terror seems apt. The cast of characters throughout more than half of the book spend their time keeping a post, scouting, eating, and drinking, with not much of anything happening. The guerrilla nature of the war shows itself with the lack of discipline of several of the main character's comrades-in-arms; a man leaves his post to hunt a rabbit, for example. The left's guerrillas hide in caves in the woods, sustained mostly by their need not to fight for the right. The right, with their warplanes, and finely maintained cavalry, seem a tier above, rendering the conflict's appearance even more hopeless for the left. But any sympathetic drive to root for the underdogs is dampened by Hemingway's deft touch in painting both sides as being vulnerable to executing the same atrocities. Early in the narrative, a scenario recounted depicting the savage execution of suspected Fascist sympathizers is brutal enough to encourage us to pick a side only after having ingested a sizable boulder of salt.

War is ugly; civil war is uglier, and I applaud Hemingway for pulling no punches in its depiction. It'd have been too easy to have made one side too sympathetic, and Hemingway resists the urge, making the narrative that much more enticing and thought-provoking. For Whom The Bell Tolls is not a smash-the-fash treatise for unthinking banner-wavers. He further humanizes the Republicans and Communists; depicting those of the Party in their full bureaucratic sloth and incompetence, an image which would only become so popular and recognizable decades later. Both sides are riddled with human fallibility, both sides equal parts detestable and sympathetic. The fascists and the communists may be equally guilty of cruelty, ignorance, and malice on a grand scale, but at the end of the day they're made up of human beings, and the further you focus down to the individual, the more we recognize ourselves in them. The more we realize—hopefully, if our heads aren't so firmly planted within our asses—that we are all capable of the same atrocities, given the circumstances. That war is hell, and we are all its devils. Such an idea is well-worn and almost cliched in our modern day, but back in Hemingway's 1937, it must have been rather refreshing to read.

Hemingway in Spain

The more I've read of Hemingway, the more I've felt that there's a core flaw in the way he writes relationships. It makes an appearance in A Farewell to Arms, as it makes an appearance in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In both books, the core "romance" feels utterly shallow. On making contact with the guerrillas in the hills, Robert Jordan meets Maria, a beautiful young Spanish woman scarred by the conflict at the heart of the novel. The two fall for one another almost immediately, and instantly begin a tryst. When separating this relationship from context, it's ridiculous. There is no common interest, no connection between these two characters. Robert Jordan is a hardened, competent soldier, likely very attractive. Maria is a young, comely woman herself. That's it. That's the romance. There's no series of conversations in which the two get to know one another's morals and interests, what makes each tick, etc. They're just attracted to one another and they begin sleeping together. The relationship doesn't hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and I found myself bored to tears by it, rolling my eyes at each instance in which Jordan professes his undying love for his beau, whom he had just met 2 days ago and knew very little about.

However, when considering the context of the great conflict occurring around them, I believe the connection makes more sense. It's even remarked on by Jordan himself, partway through the novel in a conversation with Agustin; that their relationship occurs the way it does because they lack time to get to know one another. I think there's more to it than that, and I think the characters are aware of it. As with A Farewell to Arms, I began to view the relationship as two doomed people latching on to one another; the two of them shipwrecked and drowning sailors desperately grasping for driftwood after a storm. They aren't actually in love with one another, they're just desperate for something to hold onto; an endgame, something to look forward to, a prayer to chant to themselves in the quiet moments, when the war seems hopeless—"I will take Maria with me and marry her after the war... We'll go live somewhere quiet". Maria is Robert Jordan's candle in the dark, his vision of a better time once the conflict is over. His hope that life can go back to normal, that the conflict might end and he might settle quietly once more. A rationalization he tells himself, when knowing, just beneath the surface, that he is overwhelmingly likely to die in the hills at any moment. Such is the hopelessness of the conflict he finds himself embroiled in.

Whether Hemingway intends this to be the case, or whether he's just inept at depicting a meaningful, deep relationship between two human beings is anyone's guess. After reading The Sun Also Rises, I tend toward belief in the former rather than the latter. And, in any case, Hemingway is dead—both proverbially and literally—and his literature lives on for us to interpret as we will.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a deep, nuanced view of civil war, of war in general, of soldiers and death and duty, and what all of those things force us to experience when we're faced with them. And, perhaps most compelling of all: The change they force in us if we're lucky enough to survive them. How we act in the face of death is part of what makes us human, after all. A human being's mortality tends to define us, and I think that's at the core of what Hemingway writes. Not just in this book, but all of his books.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐