Neuromancer

I can assure anyone who hates this book that there is no conspiracy, this is a book that I am still in awe of, several months after reading it.I can, however, understand people not comprehending what the hell's going on. I'd read half the novel before realising what was going on...but that's not the point.It's very difficult to describe why this book is so great. Strictly speaking, it's not "poetry" or suchlike, it's not the "originality" of his writing style.... I suppose it could be described as a sort of Japanese minimalism and American mass consumerism blend society, which is Gibson's unique vision. Here we don't have "x flew in spaceship to y, defeats z empire", but we have the world we know today, pushed to absolute overdrive. No pristine environment, or moving descriptions of the peace of space travel - here we have the dirty, hedonistic, consumerist, urban society we have today, driven by brandnames, bright lights, and no future; in essence, the Gen X-er's future. It's not quite like Blade Runner, where it's a more Film Noir type city. Here we have technology used, not to benefit mankind but to sell to consumers - people who live out their lives as the pawns of corporations. There is of course the wonderful descriptions of Virtual Reality/Internet, where mankind has created a sort of spirit-world, where depressed outcasts of this society can escape from the "world of meat". I suppose this is why I think Neuromancer is great.

I read this book in 1990. I was browsing a book store with my boyfriend, who picked up the book and exclaimed ``Wow, listen to this!'' upon reading the first sentence. ("The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.")He bought the book, loan it to me the next week and I never returned it. Gibson's lyric writing, his intricate plotting, his discomfort with corporate omnipresense are all worth savoring...you'll read the novel once for story, then again (and again) for text and texture. He's also a master at capturing the way a city feels, how it crowds you and isolates you at the same time. (Manhattanites will definitely get it.)In any event, I'm not at all involved in computers or high technology of any kind. Gibson may be the father of cyberpunk and the coiner of the word "cyberspace," but you don't need to know or care what that means to enjoy his books, particularly Neuromancer.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." So begins William Gibson's prophetic and apocryphal novel NEUROMANCER, the first in his SPRAWL Trilogy and arguably the most important Science Fiction novel of the Century. In a single, mind-bending work, Gibson propelled an entire generation into a new era of information perception, an era that has since woven itself strand-by-strand into the global information nexus we call the World Wide Web.It begins with Case, a young and bitter cyberspace cowboy prowling the neon-lit streets of Chiba City, in search of his lost identity. Robbed of his talent for working the Matrix as a data thief and cyberspace pirate, his life is a bleak and desolate journey towards self-destruction. Until the day a mirror-eyed assassin offers him a second chance.Suddenly Case is an unwitting pawn in a game whose board stretches from Chiba to the Sprawl to an orbiting pleasure colony populated by Ninja clones and Zion-worshipping Rastafarian spacers. The job: to hack the unhackable. To break the ICE around an Artificial Intelligence and release it from its own hardwired mind. But at every turn Case is haunted by the shadows of his own dark past, and pursued by a faceless enemy whose very presence can kill.Ironically, William Gibson tapped out the wonders of NEUROMANCER on a manual typewriter, and was certain it was fated for the Out Of Print stack or a quiet cult following. But now, over ten years later and still in print, it has become a kind of cultural landmark in a sea of Information; a chrome-and-silicon avatar of everything from the World Wide Web to Virtual Reality. NEUROMANCER must not be explained or related; it must be experienced, taken in through the pores and rolled against the tongue like electric adrenaline. And there is only one way to do so.Pick up a copy. And jack in.Clay Douglas Major