William Gibson is one of my favorite writers, and it's funny because I think he has the exact opposite problem. Most of his novels open on the action, in some interesting location. But gradually they get weaker, with a few (Mona Lisa Overdrive, in my case) becoming a real slog to finish. I've probably read the first 50 pages of Neuromancer 20 times, but only the entire novel 3-4 times in 20+ years.
There's the famous opening line to Neuromancer, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." But I actually like the openings of Count Zero and Virtual Light more:
CZ: 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.
The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel. Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.
VL: The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.
IMO some writers are just better as short story writers, not novelists, but are forced into writing longer works by the publishing system.
Gibson is one of those writers who are much better prose stylists than plotters.
I enjoy reading his prose immensely, but he's been stamping out books with the same template for ever: an expert is hired to do something. Turns out there's a man with unlimited cash flow funding everything, but was hiding his true intentions (usually in order to lay a trap), which are revealed, and then some McGuffin is saved or eliminated or whatever; meanwhile, the main character mostly didn't do anything, just a passive spectator to some plot unfolding around them. The one I will forgive most easily here is Count Zero, which I think is much better than its reputation (except for the Haitian voodoo deity stuff, which didn't land for me); while the template is the same, the ruse connects well with Neuromancer, and it's just a fun, action-filled book that is definitely not boring. (The ruse in The Peripheral, by comparison, was deeply unsatisfying. Agency was junk, most of the book describing preparations for a military attack while the main character sleeps. Even the prose was much worse and much sloppier than usual.)
What's interesting is that his early short stories are much more original, I think. Burning Chrome, New Rose Hotel, and Johnny Mnemonic, for example, show flashes of originality that maybe Gibson wasn't able to keep up when plotting out whole novels.
Yeah it does seem like he picked his story structure in 1984 and decided, “well, that’s done, now on to the interesting parts.”
> short story writers
esp. among sci-fi, as sci-fi is more about concept than execution,
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