Neuromancer: Do a double take.

I'm a fan of dystopias. I love them. And what generally strikes me about them while I'm reading them is exactly how much different the world is from ours, and how much it's really not so different. As a political junkie, I enjoy considering the types of legislation and other policies that would/could be put in place that would make our society more like the one in the book. In general, the author of books like this have to spend a good chunk of the book explaining what the world is like around the characters. How exactly the government keeps up certain lies, how things have changed, etc. In Neuromancer, however, the book takes no time to help the reader adjust. The world is very different, we can tell that right away, but Gibson essentially makes the reader figure out what is going on in the world. Gibson gives vivid descriptions, but generally only as the characters in the novel run by them or consider them as a normal part of the scenery (ex: octagon, joeboy, coffins, etc).

Another thing that hit me was the subtle ways that the society is different from ours. There are very obvious things that are different from the beginning: there's a lot of cosmetic surgery (so much that it's weird, and a choice, to be ugly), people have extra metal and silicon parts attached to their bodies to help them do things (though this may be closer to reality than it seems), and the idea that one could lose their job by being unable to become "linked in" to cyberspace is foreign to us. There are points that are less obvious, though. At the beginning of Chapter 3, Case "watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn." In that one sentence, which doesn't sound too out of the ordinary, especially knowing Case at the beginning of this book, there are a lot of things that simply feel off if one thinks about it.
1. I had to Google search "Danish vodka" to find out if there was such a thing. Granted, I'm not a connoisseur of alcohol by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think of the Danes when I think of vodka.
2. Case bought vodka at a kiosk. Hard liquor is kept behind a counter, generally, even in more liquor-friendly states than Texas. One tends to think of a liquor store as a place you go, not a booth you might stumble upon in the aisles of the mall or something like that.
3. What caught my eye about this sentence originally was the words "an hour before dawn." As dawn is the time just before sunrise, we generally think of dawn as one of the only times of day, with the exception of Sundays, that pretty much no one can purchase alcohol, and more especially liquor. After glancing quickly over Wikipedia, only in Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, Atlantic City (NJ), and Cicero (IL) can one purchase alcohol 24 hours a day.

So why the digression into alcohol laws? This quick, short sentence, all by itself, brought up the fact that the laws where Case is purchasing Danish vodka at 4 or 5 a.m. must be quite different than the ones we're used to. I suspect that Neuromancer will be packed subtle suggestions like this, and I'm sure I will not catch them all, but this one really got me thinking. The world doesn't have to involve weird fake food and people with metal and plastic parts for it to be a very different setting than we're used to.