American Novels

"When Rydell clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space…he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain…And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain. “Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. “You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-tel space.”"

"And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them. “Wait. Any of you live in San Francisco?” The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?” “Well, do you like it?…Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.” “Tokyo? Who told you that?” Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…” “Tell us” the dinosaur said. So Rydell did."

"Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky…And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were. Rydell hadn’t ever seen anything like them…helicopters, but too small to carry anybody…French Aérospatiale gun-platforms…under the control of the Emergency Command Control Communications System. “Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response. “POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.” And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts. The Russians’ mouths were open… “ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.” But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands…their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard."

"So I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future."

"I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans."

"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?" "Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."

"“So if Wintermute's backing the whole show, it's paying us to burn it…burning itself?" "Real motive problem, with an AI," the construct said. "Not human…Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one." "Are you sentient, or not?" "Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them philosophical questions, I guess…But I ain't likely to write you no poem. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human…[Does] it own itself?" "Swiss citizen," Case said, "but T-A owns the basic software and the mainframe." "That's a good one. Like, 'I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship.' Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.""

"Case stared. "I don't understand you guys at all." "Don' stan you, mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one." Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix."

"They’d been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way…They were from Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts…Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He’d overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television."

"The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels."

"The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding...The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the beta-phenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive."

""How old are you, boss?" "Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and you are in the way." "One thing," Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. "Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?" He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged. "It doesn't matter," Roland said. "You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we _create_ flexibility, in situations where it is required." The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's."

""Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me." "Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked."

"He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then — old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy — his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die."

"Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter."

"But Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer. Perhaps it all goes to prove that there are situations (literary ones, at least) in which a little knowledge is not only a dangerous thing, but the best tool for the job at hand."

"It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths."

"So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's Escape from New York, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and all other artifacts of the style sometimes dubbed "cyberpunk." Those French guys, they got their end in early."

"COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT—On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero."

"They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming."

"Shit. He'd come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the icebreaker he'd rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in, punching for the base he'd chosen as his first live target…He'd only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but he already knew he wanted to be more than just some Barrytown hotdogger. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, but it was already over."

"The Finn was looking at Bobby now. “I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.""

"The stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t."

"The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she’d heard of but had no intention of buying."

"“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”"

"The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita. For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her purse…The ghost woke to Kumiko's touch as they began their descent into Heathrow…a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches and riding boots. "Hullo," the ghost said…"Name's Colin…Didn't get your name." "You aren't real," she said sternly. He shrugged."

"London was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care…Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire."

"He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did."

"That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news."

"“You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar. Sally looked down. “Yeah.” “Why don’t you have it removed?” “Sometimes it’s good to remember.” “Being hurt?” “Being stupid.”"

"Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?"

"The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about…'When It Changed'?" "The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a 'hidden people.' The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

"Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human."

"Kumiko looked into Colin's transparent green eyes…"What are you?" "A Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base programmed to aid and advise the Japanese visitor in the United Kingdom." He winked at her. "Why did you wink?" The ghost touched his lips with a slim forefinger. "I'm something else as well, yes. I do display a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program. I can't tell you exactly what I am, though, because I don't know.""

"Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that."

"It's all going to change, Yamazaki." "I don't understand." "Know what the joke is? It didn't change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I've been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history. Last time we had one like this was 1911." "What happened in 1911?" "Everything changed."

"“Okay,” Arleigh said.“What are the nodal points?” Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds, except the things you see are really there.” “Yamazaki promised me you weren’t crazy.” “It’s not crazy. It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”"

""What's your name? Your Turing code. What is it?" "Neuromancer, the lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed."

"The two surviving Founders of Zion were…old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity. “Steppin' Razor," one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber. “Like unto a whippin' stick." “That is a story we have, sister," said the other, “a religion story." “How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked. “I came from Los Angeles. Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Steppin' Razor." Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air. The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. “You bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart.""

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

"Gomi Boy’s cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a perfect white tube with a brown tip he put to his lips. Chia had seen those in old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn’t gone through yet to digitally erase them."

"“What kind of hotel did you say this is?” Chia got into the elevator. “Love hotel,” Masahiko said. “What’s that?” Going up. “Private rooms. For sex. Pay by the hour…but people who come here sometimes wish to port. There is a reposting service that makes it very hard to trace. Also for phoning, very secure.” Chia was looking at the round pink furry bed."

"If Laney had anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. She was nothing like that…And now her eyes met his. He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows…Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk."

"The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be."

"James Redfield's breakout 1993 novel, The Celestine Prophecy, brought forward Eastern philosophies and New Age spirituality to a primarily American audience. The book used a traditional narrative to transmit concepts of spiritual awakening, energetic fields and synchronicity to the reader. In 1993, these concepts were still emerging, and have since become hugely popular in mainstream books, movies and music. The book spent an incredible 165 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller's List, making it one of the most successful books of all time. It has sold over 50 million copies to date, and established James Redfield as a millionaire."

"The Celestine Prophecy released [when I was] around 15/16 years old... was the first Spiritual book I read, and it validated how I was thinking and feeling. It helped me see all events had a meaning and the higher intelligence I sought comfort in was in fact real. This thinking, in essence to not be a victim, definitely helped me emotionally survive my father’s suicide at age 19 and decide at 21 I wasn’t going down the path of destruction that I was currently on at that time."

"This [The Celestine Prophecy] just opened my heart and made me realize, ‘Try to love a little bit more.’ When I try to console people and tell them words of wisdom that I’ve learned, a lot of people feel so much better. Some people say, ‘Shut the hell up.’ I just send the love and think, ‘Someday you’ll see.'"

"The Ninth Insight says that while some individuals may cross over sporadically, a general rapture will not occur until we have abolished fear, until we can maintain a sufficient vibration in all situations. p. 155"

"According to The Celestine Prophecy, in the future humankind will evolve into a spiritually enlightened culture of peace and harmony... Einstein is on the side of The Celestine Prophecy, we're told. Most scientists are not sufficiently evolved to carry on his work. After all, they would not take seriously the assertion that in the future human beings will be raised "to higher and higher vibrations." Its message is that there is no such thing as a coincidence; there are no chance encounters, no arbitrary events, no reasons for existential angst. There is only cosmic synchronicity, to which we become attuned as we evolve spiritually... According to The Celestine Prophecy, in the future humankind will evolve into a spiritually enlightened culture of peace and harmony. All these insights into the meaning of everything are delivered in what the flap copy for The Celestine Prophecy calls "a parable filled with vital truths"--a description bound to lead an unsophisticated reader to believe that this book is fact, not fiction... For people who believe in angels, to be sure, believing in The Celestine Prophecy isn't much of a leap--angel books tell similar truths... In The Celestine Prophecy the primary villains are not scientists but priests. In near-death-experience accounts God, or the "Being of Light" who greets us when we die, is nonjudgmental. Like a wise but indulgent parent, He, She, or It smiles ruefully upon us when we review our sins, knowing that we will do better next time."

"Whenever we doubt our own path, or lose sight of the process, we must remember what we are evolving toward, what the process of living is all about. Reaching heaven on Earth is why we are here. And now we know how it can be done... how it will be done."