Neuromancer
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.
Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.
Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.
Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.
Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.
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Community Reviews
Sadly, our bookkeeping records for 2002 aren't as complete as we'd like, but we know we read this book during that time.
Impossible to rate. Immensely confusing, at times outdated, and very brooding in a gritty ‘90s reboot type of way, but also builds the most realistic and compelling cyberpunk world ever. If you’re looking for true Bladerunner-style literature this is the Bible. Reading it is almost like reading Shakespeare, in that:
A) it’s super confusing and a lot of words you’re gonna have to look up.
B) it becomes more spectacular when put in the context of the time writing it. Shakespeare was writing the most beautiful literature of all time for an audience that was majority illiterate. William Gibson wrote an entire cyberpunk universe with a matrix, video screens, AI, and body-mods back when the internet was still mostly landlines.
So, it’s a complicated book. The fact that it feels so markedly similar to Bladerunner, down to the mishmash of Eastern and Western influences, is a coincidence. Gibson apparently saw Bladerunner when he was a third of the way through writing it and thought he was doomed to be considered a copycat. Instead, every single futuristic dystopian sci-fi universe has cribbed extensively from his notes. It’s weird to read the originator of so many turgid cliches that have been absorbed into culture. Reading it in the year 2026 is like listening to Buddy Holly. It feels impossibly familiar, only because it’s been copied and copied and copied so many times. Impossible to rate properly, I can neither recommend nor dissuade you from reading it. But it is the ur-text for a certain kind of noir sci-fi about hackers who battle in cyberspace, and that’s pretty sick.
Will's been telling me to read this for years, and I finally did. I fully loved this book, which is credited with inventing the entire cyberpunk, science fiction genre 41 years ago. The descriptions of this futuristic world were so complex / gritty / intriguing. I ate it up. You'll love this if you liked watching The Peripheral, Altered Carbon, Blade Runner, or The Matrix. Off to read the rest of this series!
The book conveys a sense of confusion and overload of information in a dystopian society. The prelude to our current life.
Neuromancer, if it didn't invent cyberpunk, certainly established it as a subgenre of science fiction. I had seen little bits of storyline like it, but as elements of backdrop in other sci-fi stories. This was the first that immersed me in it. The vision required at the time to conceive of such a strong intertwining of man and machine that was not just a warmed-over bionic man scenario was truly groundbreaking. It was fascinating in its depiction of how machines not only influenced a character's abilities, but the character as a person. This is common nowadays with the proliferation of technology, but in 1984, Gibson was a prophet. Brilliant writing. Highly recommended!
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