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Neuromancer

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Definite science fiction

If you're in the mood for some science fiction, Neuromancer will most certainly fit the bill.

This is a cyberpunk adventure that is a little complex to understand while reading it (I had to look at a story overview afterward to truly see everything that happened) but is certainly incredibly enjoyable. William Gibson's writing style is fantastic; there's some almost poetic passages in there ("The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat incision, laying the city open.") along with a nice mix of dark humor and lots of personality.

Definitely recommend a read!

Tenacity needed all ye who enter here

Let me preface this review by saying the following: I love to read. I love science fiction and I love fantasy. I read a lot of books.

I read this book for a class I'm taking and I feel confident in saying that if it wasn't for the class, I would have piked out half way through. I appreciate the legacy of this book and I applaud the incredible imagination of William Gibson and his insight into the future. We're already at the point he talks about in this book - in a virtual world, our bodies are certainly "meat" and some people (gamers, I'm talking to you) live online, breathe online and lots of people love online. But this book is god damn hard work to read. As soon as I started reading I had to just surrender to the book and not try and keep track of places, words, people, currency, job titles, weapons. I had to let it flow into me and hope it made sense eventually. It did, so I can definitely say that if you stay with it there is a light at the end of the book.

I pretty much had a handle on the book when we blasted off to outer space which shook me (and the story) up. I found Molly and her fingernail implants and checkered past as a hooker to be an interesting side kick to our cowboy anti-hero and Case himself was a study in imperfection and reactive decisions.

Ultimately I do think this book has changed my thinking a bit, and all the best books do that - alter the way we look at the world, even if only by a few millimeters or 0.2 of a degree, so I would encourage people to read this book. But take the attitude I spoke of - "jack in" and let it wash over you, let it make its own sense, let the picture clear at its own pace.

Unbelievable Vision, Interesting Style...

I just finished this novel yesterday, and I must admit that I was a little late...OK, a lot late...to the Cyberpunk party. I've always been intrigued by Cyberpunk but had never read any of Gibson's work. Simply put, this novel is absolutely wrought with a wholly entertaining, yet complex and gritty vision of the future.

Neuromancer isn't quite like anything I've ever read before. The concepts of cyberspace and the "matrix" was completely ahead of its time, but beyond that Gibson creates a world where technological immersion is the rule, not the exception. Couple that with sharp dialogue and breakneck pacing, and the result is great sci-fi.

My only gripe with Gibson as a writer is that he sometimes relies too heavily on dialogue to tell his story. His characters are often portrayed as being very flat and cold. His dialogue matches that by being very casual but pointed and quick (sometimes too quick), and often loaded with a bevy of techno-terms and slang (some of which have no clear meaning). He divulges just barely enough information to keep the reader going, which sometimes results in the reader being unclear on who's talking and exactly what they're talking about. I often felt a little disconnected from things because I wasn't able to put the pieces together right away. A stylistic choice certainly, but it may not sit well with all readers. On the other hand, that may just be part of Gibson's brilliance in that he doesn't spoon feed the reader everything.

With that said, Neuromancer is still a very enjoyable novel, and most definitely a head-scratcher. Fans of sci-fi and cyberpunk absolutely must give this a shot - it's not hard to see why it's a classic.

Should be part of every science-fiction lovers' collection

This book has been shuffled around on my ever-expanding bookshelf for a number of years, but recently seeing my roommate reading Asimov's "I, Robot" whetted my appetite for the surreal intellectual indulgence that science fiction represents. William Gibson's "Neuromancer" sated that appetite very well, and I feel satisfied, and, in fact, rather interested to read more of his work.

Most anyone familiar with the Matrix Trilogy, Blade Runner and other futuristic sci-fi blockbusters will feel right at home in Chiba City and the Sprawl, the neon-scrawled megalopolises buzzing with cryptic technologies and high-tech crimes, in which Neuromancer is set. Case, a freelance hacker with a taste for alcohol and futuristic drugs, has a disposition that seems to have become something of a norm in the genre - world-weary, aloof, and vaguely anti-establishmentarian. The plot unfolds at a brisk pace, and we follow Case through a wide variety of this dystopian Earth's dark alleys, into low orbit aboard a city-sized space-capsule, and, importantly and fascinatingly, into the bleak expanses of darkness and glittering neon chasms of digital information as he punches in on his Ono-Sendai terminal to experience a virtual reality computer-interface called the matrix.

Although Case is the main character, the real star of the show is Wintermute - an advanced, self-aware artificial intelligence conceived to govern the goings-on of a corporate conglomerate known as Tessier-Ashpool. Wintermute, we begin to learn, is the (digitalized) mind behind the character's mission, a kind of puppet-master operating from the vast blackness of the computer world.

William Gibson popularized a wide swath of the computer-based lexicon that we now take for granted such as "artificial intelligence" and the "matrix." What's so impressive about this novel, and why I would recommend it to those, not just with an interest in technology, but also about human nature, is that Gibson didn't stop at just creating a fantastically vivid world of high-tech super hackers. He used Wintermute, a sentient being of human design, to call into question the nature of perception and subjective reality. By the stories' end, the reader has been exposed to issues that causes them to ask questions like, "What is real?" and "Would I choose to live an eternity of happiness if I knew it wasn't real?" and, that now ubiquitous question, "Am I already part of the matrix?" By today's standards, this may all be misinterpreted as prosaic, even cliché. Yet this book was written in 1983, many years before Keanu Reeves was dodging bullets.

Neuromancer is a highly valuable piece of literature, both in historical context, and for its creative richness and narrative complexity and should be a part of every science-fiction lovers' collection.

Dry-swallow the pill

I used to read Omni.
(well, that dates me)
I first read William Gibson's work in that fine failed magazine.

I bought Neuromancer when it came out - gee, my Grafton '86 copy's still rocking along - and frankly, I don't own another book that can evoke a time and place, a paperback madeleine, as well as this.

I inhaled it.
I swam in it.

It didn't just float my boat, it bolted a pair of grey-import Hyundai SRMs on to it, messily plastered the hull with radar-absorbing carbon epoxy, and lit off on column of noise and steam.

If you want an insight into how one possible future might have looked from the perspective of the early 80s, you could do far worse. Like any novel, it has its problems, but it broke a mould that many couldn't even see. It was sharp, glittering, and refracted a story of improbable characters into a mere 317 pages.

Smile at the 3Mb of hot RAM, sure, go on. Chuckle at the absence of cell phones, but *do* ride Case's destructive pathway, the convolutions that Wintermute goes through - shrug - don't take it too seriously, it's just a book. But the view it gives is a memorable one.