Neuromancer
SOON TO BE AN APPLETV SERIES
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.
BUY THE BOOK
Join a book club that is reading Neuromancer!
Community Reviews
I have had this one simmering on my TBR for ages, and now that I've read it, I feel like I know it about as well as I did before I cracked it open.
This thing is dense. Opaque. Obtuse, even. I drifted along on the enjoyable vibes even as I felt myself utterly failing to keep pace with what was actually happening.
Did I like it? ...I'm not sure. I'm scoring it right down the center. I didn't hate it, and I did finish it, but I'm left feeling like "what did I even just read?!"
Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.[return][return]Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price....
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 Immensely confusing, at times outdated, and very brooding in a gritty ‘90s reboot type of way, but also builds the most realistic and compelling cyberpunk world ever.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.