Skip to main content

"Johnny Mnemonic"

“Johnny Mnemonic,” by William Gibson, is a dystopian short story about a man named Johnny who acts as a living database, storing information for others. After a violent mix-up at a club, he and the girl who caused the death of his client run off and escape to Nighttown, where she and her partners take the information and end up battling in the ruinous town over the Floor. The storyline was a bit hard to follow, and I wasn’t always clear on what was happening or who the characters were. Parts of it felt random, and the chaotic vibe was difficult to unravel.

Something that stuck with me, though, is that the scariest part of this short story wasn’t the blood or the augmented humans and dystopian ruins of society, but the empty shell that Johnny Mnemonic has made his mind. He collects information for others and spits it back out with no memory of what he said. Of course, at the end he decides to stop being a traveling flashdrive of a human being, but to live a life where your brain can be hacked for information is wild. He doesn’t even retain some of his own memories because of this.

I feel like this short story would benefit with a prologue about the world, how and why humans got to this stage of life. What kinds of people end up being data bases? Do you get to decide if you are a data base? I have a lot of questions about the universe and its societal dynamics, and I think there’s a lot of potential in “Johnny Mnemonic” for more.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

College Killers - A Look into the Reasoning Behind the Young Ages of Classic Literature's Murderers

Victor Frankenstein, the now infamous mad scientist, creator of reanimation, and star of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , is often imagined as a man in his late forties, using decades worth of knowledge and expertise to create his iconic monster. The real Victor Frankenstein, however, is merely a college student- a young, naive, and freshly independent college student. The idea of such a young man creating life and subsequently causing multiple murders because of it seems like a unique idea for a story, yet a college student committing a murder is the same plot of two other novels: Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Donna Tartt's The Secret History . All three of these books deal with a similar story involving a college student committing (or indirectly causing, in Frankenstein's case) a murder of someone they know personally. The murderer proceeds to fall ill, isolate themselves, undergo serious mental torment over the guilt, feel the urge to confess, and even...
1 comment
Read more

"I Live With You" by Carol Emshwiller: the Captivating Capture of Identity

“Unsettling” is how I’d describe Carol Emshwiller’s short story “I Live With You,” although it is still captivating. It follows a shadow-like being who impersonates and sneaks into the house of a woman named Nora with intent to heavily mess with her life. At first, this doppelganger keeps their presence a secret, but as soon as suspicions arise, they decide to have a little fun. Moving things around, leaving out trash, stealing and replacing clothes, the doppelganger plagues Nora’s house like a ghost. In fact, the imposter even goes as as far as inviting a man over and trying to both hook up with him as well as get Nora some action. Of course, this plan turns sour quickly and the doppelganger leaves Nora, who has changed into a more confident and assertive woman because of her ordeal. “I Live With You” is intriguing and puts you on edge, and the concept really makes you think. I found it interesting how Nora tried to convince herself that nothing was going on, and when things got...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Hobbit's Journey

The Hobbit , the fantasy classic by J.R.R. Tolkien, is the embodiment of the Hero’s Journey, leading us through Middle Earth on the formulaic Campbell’s path of tropes. Bilbo Baggins is a middle-aged hobbit, which is essentially a short human-like creature who lives a quiet life of comfort and luxury, who gets swept up into a quest with a troupe of dwarves to win back an abandoned mountain kingdom from the dragon Smaug. His life gets turned upside down as he’s plucked from his easy-going life, but after primarily refusing this call to adventure, Bilbo realized that he’s wanted something like this to come along. A great adventure, something to interrupt the routine life he’s lived. He, the troupe of dwarves, and Gandalf the Wizard trek along on the typical Hero’s Journey, complete with a road of trials, apotheosis, a magic flight, becoming “master of two worlds,” and returning back home as a new man- or, hobbit. Unlike a lot of L ord of the Rings fans, I actually really enjoyed th...
Post a Comment
Read more