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.
I find myself at a loss to describe how I felt about this book. In some ways, it wasn't really that great - the characters are 2D at best, the first third of the book lacks any explanation or definitions to help acclimate the reader to the new world (for a while I was convinced I was going to read the whole book without having any idea what actually happened), and the whole thing seemed vague (who was doing what and why?).
By the end, though, things cleared up, I felt more comfortable with the vocab, and I closed the book feeling as if I'd been somewhere. A book that sends me somewhere is a book worth reading, no matter what frustrations it takes to do it.
Sitting in the middle of the Internet era, it's obviously difficult to evaluate Gibson's amazing prescience, but I will say that his seeming concern from his intro in the 20th Anniversary Edition about the book's lack of cell phones is really unwarranted. Everything in Neuromancer's world fits just so, and it never would have occurred to me that it was odd no one was picking up a cell phone to contact each other.
Reading updates
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30 November, 2008:
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30 November, 2008:
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