Context Is Everything

It's amazing the difference a small piece of contextual information can make. I'm not sure precisely what reminded me of this this morning (when I get up early, my mind tends to jump around between things with no particular direction. There's just no stopping it.), but this is something that struck me with one of the books I read towards the end of last year, Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

I had it in my head that Neuromancer was one of the classics of science fiction, the book that dragged cyberpunk kicking and screaming into the light, biofeedback wires still attached and throbbing. As I started, I checked the published date via Amazon (since they provided the esteemed vehicle through which I would be reading it). 2011. Huh. I guess I must have been thinking of some other seminal piece of future-looking fiction.

So I read it, and it was fine. Good, but not the amazing book I had been led (or, perhaps, had led myself) to expect.The style was oddly confusing, and a lot of the concepts seemed stale, or poorly handled. Then I reached the end, and found the actual copyright notice. 1984. Well, that makes more sense. The concepts seemed overused because they have been aped by just about every instance of the cyberpunk genre in every medium since. The style and aesthetic felt a little jumbled because it wasn't projecting technological advances of the next 20 years, it was preempting those of the last 20.

Now, that didn't make me enjoy the book more in retrospect, as such, but it did provide an important piece of missing information which made me re-evaluate how I viewed the book. To put it another way, divorcing a book from its context can fundamentally change how we experience it (as does adding our own contexts), which, now that I say it, seems bleedin' obvious. But Neuromancer was one of the places where I've been able to observe this specifically, rather than continuing to bask in contextual ignorance after the fact.

What pieces of information have radically changed the way you view things? Not just limited to books, but to all media; I think music is a particularly good one for this.

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Now for some general updates. Clearly, I haven't been blogging much on here, to the surprise of no-one. As ever, busy busy. I have been reading a respectable-enough amount, though understandably not at the rate I did last year. I'm still working on a spidering number of writing projects, though, I seem to have been for a while without producing anything finished. I'm in a bit of a 'sprint' right now with a bunch of first drafts, and them am going to endeavor to turn out something shareable in the near future. Blogging shall continue, as far as is practical!


Above image taken from Wikipedia; using book covers to illustrate a piece about the work should constitute Fair Use.