William Gibson's "Neuromancer" manages to create worlds that are both an exercise n sensory overload and a frustrating lack of detail, leaving the reader confused as to the environment. What is perhaps most interesting in this detailed description is the attention Gibson pays to material. Scarcely a page goes by without some mention of a plastic window, a silk futon, a leather jacket, denim pants, or a fiberglass chassis. A large part of what creates the futuristic sense of Gibson's world is the development of new materials and the unfamiliar hierarchy of materials, consisting of both the new and the jarringly familiar substances. This hierarchy of material breaks down to two separate categories: body modification and environment.

Observation, I think it's rather interesting that the hotels/beds get referred to as coffins. I'm not entirely certain if this is societal, which would be interesting, given the focus on body modification, or if it's just Case, in which case that goes along with his death wish and frustrations and self-loathing of his body.

While the bugs are all kinds of huge in the movie, I was surprised at how little they actually figured in the book. The entire book I kept waiting for the epic bug fights, as my previous introduction to the story had been through the second half of the movie. A third of the way through the book, Rico gets out of boot camp. The bugs aren't even mentioned until the halfway point. For all that there is commentary about the evil commie hive-mind bugs, I found that they had virtually no importance in the novel. The book never truly ends, and the bug war certainly doesn't. Rico has had time to make it to Lieutenant, and it's still the same war against the same enemy with heated combat.

The Federation strikes me much more as a war industry than a political force. It doesn't matter who the enemy is, it just matters that there is an enemy, and that it is very different from humanity.

One of Suvin's main defining points of the SF genre in his 1972 essay "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre" is "[t]he world of a work of SF is not a priori intentionally oriented toward its protagonists, either positively or negatively; the protagonists may succeed or fail in their objectives, but nothing in the basic contract with the reader, in the physical laws of their worlds, guarantees either" (378). While I realize Suvin isn't speaking to the sci fi tv shows of his day or that would follow, I wonder how his definition translates to a storyline with multiple installments.