I was pleased recently to find out that William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic is posted online in it's entirety, here, since this gave me the chance to read the story from the comfort of my chair without paying money, or sitting in a bookstore or something.
I was pleased, reading it, because it's really not all that great. The movie might actually be a better story, minus the fact that it doesn't have Molly. I mean, it's very creative, laying out many, if not most, of the ideas and concepts and social commentary that would pop up in Neuromancer (except for cyberspace). But the story is just not that engaging. There's really no sense of building tension, it's kind of disjointed.
That said, Gibson is pretty good at the basic mechanics of writing. The final fight between Molly and the vatgrown Yakuza assassin is really well told. It's just that Gibson took the concept of "start as late in the story as possible" to its extreme, and as a result there is really no connection with the main character. I read the entire story not giving a shit that I knew the narrator was going to get offed shortly after the narration closes. That's bad.
Still, better than Pynchon's early short fiction. I think I just like novels better than short stories.
Also, I just wanted to point out that the story is really good if one is a Molly fan. It think this is the most ass-kicking she does in any story. Which is funny, because while this is Molly at her most consistently ass-kicking, she is less badass than she is in either Neuromancer or Mona Lisa Overdrive. Just not as scary and psychopathic.
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Hey, what ethnic group does the skeleton knight belong to?
Hey Mary. Man, I lost the thread recently.
I see the Skeleton Knight's mother as having been a refugee from Breton, fleeing the Anglo-Saxon onslaught. She is a peasant, though, and thus purely Celtic, a British Celt, settled in Brittany.
His father lacks both humanity and mortality, but I see him as having been proto-Indo-European. Whatever group that lived in the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains and developed the tongue and is the root of Sanskrit, German, and Latin, he belonged to, whatever they were. I see him, at the time, as being incredibly pale, but with black hair. I feel like that group probably was tall, pale, blond, with sharp features, but I see him with black hair. Hey, I doubt any ethnicity has ever been uniform, so I see no reason he has to be. That's just the was I see him.
This makes SK half Breton and Half Indo-European, I guess. Though it's arguable that he is only Breton, since his father's legacy might not have been passed along in a genetic sense. Sorry to obfuscate, to a degree, but I want to keep those details close to the vest at this point.
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