Week 11: Johnny Mnemonic (3)

 

My favorite thing about William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic is how it uses genre. It is, in essence, a noir detective story, with its quirky, campy names like Molly Millions, Ralfi Face, and of course the titular Johnny Mnemonic, it just also happens to contain the technological aspects that happen to be found in traditional cyberpunk stories.

Johnny Mnemonic reminds me of my favorite cyberpunk noir detective story, the Penumbra Podcast's Juno Steele series. That is a sentence I thought I'd never write, because it seems like such a specific genre mix, it's bound to only happen once, and yet here we are. However, this mix might not be so unlikely. The thing about cyberpunk is that it has a distinctly different vibe to the clean, shiny, brand new chrominess of space operas. Cyberpunk seems to imply some element of being dirty or run-down, cyberpunk is what happens to space operas when you add a lot of colorful neon lights and then leave it to decay without cleaning it up for a few years. In the back of my writerly hindbrain, something about the griminess of cyberpunk seems to evoke the griminess of the old noir tales of yore. 

 Johnny Mnemonic takes a similar approach to the Juno Steele series and just drops the reader into the world of the story without taking the time to explain the intricacies of the world, or any of the technology or lingo, so the reader sort of has to piece things together on their own. I’m not someone who pieces things together very easily, so I did spend a lot of the story being very confused, but the adventure aspects of the story supplemented me enough that I was willing to follow along with the plot until I did understand everything.