neuromancer

Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a blank expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the fast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. P.6-7

The setting description found early in Neuromancer invokes thoughts of death, as it describes that he "slept in... coffins." Later in the passage the word "heart" is used, which makes me think of the opposite of death, life. The setting set here also focuses on light with words like "halogen, lit, glare, hologram" but it contrasts it with the images of darkness and deadness. Interestingly, it is the night time that seems to be lively with light, while it is during the day that the whole city dies out "dead, inert, waiting." I think that this setting description probably has another meaning underlying the interesting light/dark day/night pairings. There is a lot of technical terminology in this passage as well, which makes it difficult for me to track with the description. I don’t know precisely what "quartz-halogen" is, nor "Shoals of white styrofoam" and "arcologies." Another mysterious choice of words is "poised silver sky." I wonder what makes the silver sky look poisoned? But it still has the affect of reminding me that this is another world unlike the world I know, so the confusion and lack of clarity is okay.

Another place where I found the paring of life/death and light/darkness was on page 47 where the setting is set with the interesting pairing of words: "Lifeless Neon."