Details

Buy it now from Amazon

Neuromancer

Ace

List price: $7.99
Lowest new price: $2.95
Lowest used price: $0.01

Average customer rating: 4 stars

The First, but Not the Best--Still an Excellent Read

Just finished Neuromancer and thought it was a decent read. I've read books in this genre that I liked more, especially The Electric Church by Jeff Somers, but all of these books owe a substantial debt to William Gibson. In the age of cyberspace, it was inevitable that someone would write the first big book like Neuromancer, but Gibson actually did write it.

Gibson's world in Neuromancer is richly described and visionary; it's especially visionary when you consider that Gibson wrote it in 1984, well before the internet was an integral part of popular culture. There are times in the book when I thought that the prose in Neuromancer was awkward because Gibson was imagining things that just weren't yet defined in 1984. Another notion that I found compelling was the idea that stateless corporations had basically transcended the power of traditional governments.

IMO, the biggest weakness in Neuromancer is the ending. The ending isn't a bust--don't let this stop you from picking up Neuromancer--but I felt that the ending was rushed. It was as if Gibson had put together a tautly paced story leading to a destination, but once he arrived at the destination he wasn't quite sure what to do when he got there. An epilogue does wrap things up, but it's brief, a bit anti-climatic, and I thought it was a bit of a cop-out. Perhaps most disappointing of all, the only character that changed was one with which I felt little identification (No spoilers by naming the character).

All of that being said, Neuromancer is a solid read. It's not the best cyberpunk novel, but it was the first big cyberpunk novel. For the most part, it's well-paced and vividly imagined. I'd definitely recommend it.

NEUROMANCER by William Gibson

William Gibson's Neuromancer, which won the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Hugo Award, is considered the seminal cyberpunk novel. Indeed, the profound influence of Neuromancer can still be seen in cyberpunk of all kinds, from Shadowrun to Deus Ex to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Cyberpunk as it exists today largely reflects Gibson's vision, from the use of loner characters to the portrayals of hackers, technology and corporations to the very concept of cyberspace.

Neuromancer is the story of Case, a down-on-his-luck hacker, who gets a second chance at his career when he gets hired to do a mysterious hack for a mysterious employer with mysterious motives. In many respects, Gibson's concepts are excellent. His world, inasmuch as he describes it, is immersive.

The fundamental problem with Neuromancer is Gibson's narrative. He does a bad job of describing places, which makes the story jerky. The reader can easily keep track of who is doing what, but not why or where people are doing things. Actions just happen, seemingly arbitrarily, one after another, building toward a fairly underwhelming climax. The reader may very well ask, upon the novel's conclusion, "so what?". The story itself is fairly pedestrian - it seems like it would make a better video game than novel (and Deus Ex did borrow heavily from it, successfully). The book also suffers because none of the characters are particularly well-developed or sympathetic.

In Neuromancer, Gibson is, annoyingly, addicted to the use of the word "lozenge". He uses it frequently, for all kinds of things, most of which aren't actually lozenge. You could make a lozenge drinking game for this book. You could do the same with all the random drugs all the characters are on.

Undeniably, Neuromancer has style. It just isn't a very good story.

If Only Gibson Had Continued With This Story...

This is the best of Gibson's work. It holds up after several readings and becomes richer and more mind-expanding each time you enter its world of the cyberpunk future that we're living in. Somehow, later work by Gibson doesn't quite measure up to the brilliance of "Neuromancer," at least for me. Hard as I try, I can't get into the characters or even the language of Gibson's later works. I keep wanting to be jacked into the matrix of "Neuromancer," back where I think I belong, back where the world as I know exists. If Gibson had simply continued with the characters from this novel, added more dimensions to the world he created, if he had done what Lawrence Durrell did in the "Alexandria Quartet" only from the point of view cyberspace, I think we'd all be happier. Maybe, maybe not.

-Tom Maremaa, Author of the Forthcoming Novel "Metal Heads" from Kunati Books in Spring 2009

Lives up to the hype

Okay, now I understand what all the fuss is about. Gibson creates a vivd and engrossing world, entirely believable despite being so fantastic, and does so with a daring, sharp prose style that makes no apologies for bowling forward and leaving slow readers behind. He never holds you by the hand. Never indulges in overt descriptions and filling in all the blanks. It's just quick, cutting, laced with attitude, and on the edge of danger. This was fantastic stuff. Astonishing that this was his first novel. Thankfully I have another Gibson or two on my shelf; I'll certainly be reading them in the near future.

Still Good After All These Years

I first read Gibson's "Neuromancer" when it first came out (about 24 years ago) and really enjoyed it. I just finished reading it again, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it's weathered the intervening decades very well. This book created a genre by envisioning a wired world when, at the time, microcomputer's barely existed and ARPANET hadn't even started the move away from the Defense/Academic community to become the internet. It's truly amazing that such a book is still worthwhile today. It does have some minor problems with the characters and pacing, but those are insignificant compared to its historical significance. I rate it at a Very Good four stars out of five.