NeuromancerWilliam Gibson
Ace Books
1984

“Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.”

Case was the sharpest data thief in the Matrix until an ex-employer crippled his nervous system. Now a new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run against an unthinkable powerful artificial intelligence. With a mirror-eyed girl street-samurai riding shotgun, he’s ready for the silicon-quick, bleakly prophetic adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

In my ongoing quest to read the classics in the Sci-Fi and Horror genres (and all points in-between), I always knew Neuromancer was going to be read sooner or later. And like the others that have been upheld as pillars of genre fiction, I discovered this novel through word of mouth (in a matter of speaking) online. Would that be considered retroactive irony? I don’t know. I’m afraid I’m not that clever.

Anyway, even as a novice, I could see the impact that Neuromancer had, and it was considerable. It’s arguably one of the defining works of cyberpunk fiction, coining the words “matrix” and “cyberspace”, and painting scenes of ultra-urban decay that most novels of future dystopias use as a template. How influential? You know that movie The Matrix you may have heard about? I wouldn’t say it ripped off the novel, but then again “heavily influenced” just doesn’t seem to do justice, either. And not just with the name. Is “archetypal cyberpunk novel” a bit too pretentious sounding? Again, not that clever.

It’s interesting to note that, when writing Neuromancer, author William Gibson suffered a bit from self-inadequacy, and rewrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, and even then figured everyone would hat it, thinking he was ripping off the just-released movie Blade Runner, and be “permanently shamed” after its inevitable publication. But then everyone thought it was brilliant, going so far as to win the trifecta of Science Fiction awards: the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award, as well as being nominated for the British Science Fiction Award. Not too shabby, there.

So, what did I, a casual sci-fi reader (well, bit more than “casual”, I would say) think of Neuromancer? In a word: Interesting. “Interesting” in the sense that I found reading Neuromancer a bit more challenging than the usual sci-fi I usually go through. “Challenging” in that it really got my imagination running. Which is the mark of really good literary fiction, no matter the genre.

The story in Neuromancer concerns a former cyber hacker named Henry Dorsett Case (no relation) who is now a low-level hustler in the slum areas, due to his ability to jack into the Matrix taken away by former employers, let’s just say. He runs across Molly, a street samurai with surgical enhancements that are fashionable as well as functional. She works for a shading individual named Armitage, who offers him a job pulling the ultimate hack job; he cures Case’s conditions, but since he’s shady (and rich), he’s left a bit of an incentive to ensure Case’s services. With the help of the digitized conscience of on of Case’s mentors into cyberhacking, a street gang and a couple of space Rastafarians, they run into an AI called Wintermute, a sociopath that can create holographic illusions at will, the third clone of a tech inventor, and Wintermute’s sibling AI known as Neuromancer. Reality and what we would call virtual reality blur together, and by the time you get to the end of the book, if your head doesn’t feel like it’s about to explode out the back of your head, well…you’re just not paying attention.

Like I said, reading Neuromancer required a bit more involvement and paying attention on my part. A lot of the details outside of the general narrative are left up to the reader’s imagination to suss out for themselves; I rather enjoyed not being spoon-fed like that, and it kind of forced me to slow down and didn’t let me just skim over things like I can normally do. The story itself is dark, a real nihilistic journey to the anti-happy ending, and that, my wonderful freaks, left me with a very satisfied afterglow when I came to the very last sentence on the very last page. Well, the very last page of the novel proper—there were still the obligatory adds for other books that Ace published at the time. Such was the paperback trade in the 1980s.

You want to read something good? Read Neuromancer. Own your own copy. This seems to be something I might be cracking open and reading more than once. It didn’t change my life, mind you (I was already something of a dark weirdo to begin with), but fortunately I didn’t find Neuromancer to be overrated as well. Recommended.