Neuromancer settings

William Gibson begins his fiction Neuromancer in a bar called Chatsubo, a place full of professional expatriates. It contains all sorts of complex-night-life characters such as an ugly bartender, call girls, drug dealers, and our main character Case. There seems to be no law at this place for people could carry guns, call prostitutes, and fight as if they were normal. Gibson’s description of the sky as having “the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” portrays the setting of the story as being dark and gray, perhaps referring to the busy night life of the city, famous for its black medicine and black market.

Neuromancer is set in the near future, an “age of affordable beauty’ and full of high tech. The story takes place in Chiba, a town in Japan, known as a magnet for the Sprawl’s techno-criminal culture. It is also where Case’s last hope of finding a cure for his nervous system lies. As the story progresses, we follow Case to different places such as Jarre de The’ and Julius Deanne’s place. Jarre de The’ is designed with mirrors and red neon lights and decorated with last century style. At Julius Deanne’s place, the descriptions are more detailed and specific. It is not simply how the room looks like, but also what style the furniture are and where they are located in the room. The setting is more like a normal office that we could connect to as oppose to the red neon chambers of the Jarre de The’ teashop.

The author also touches on a place called the Matrix, where Case still sees so often in his dream. Unlike the previously described settings, Gibson describes the Matrix as a cyberspace with “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.” It is a place where only the mind can take and reality seems to be nonexistence. Here, Case could feel bodiless and free his mind. In the real world, Case “fell in the prison of his own flesh” for he is physically bound by his body. However, one similarity between the cyberspace and the external spaces is that they both offer a way of escape from reality. Similar to how the Matrix allows Case to live in bodiless exultation, the external places offer this escape through means of drugs, drinks and prostitution.