The prose is the art. In Blade Runner, the world is built with dense backdrops of an alien city, people walking around in strange clothes, etc. All that is imprinted on you without a single line of dialogue.
With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.
If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.
This. I recall an interview with Gibson where he said that he hung out in watering holes frequented by IT folks. He spent a lot of time picking up the atmosphere and cadence of the language, which he imitated in his works.
Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?" stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers to the question are no better than a random man on the street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile => Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense like Johnny Mnemonic.
I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.
As the Romans say, "there's no point arguing about taste." I find Gibson's stories hard to follow in some cases, but at the same time he is very inventive when it comes to language and mood. I find it worth the effort. To calibrate, my favorite sci-fi author is a toss-up between Stephenson (wildly entertaining) and LeGuin (digs into human relations and society like almost no other author).
With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.
If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.