Product Description
SPECIAL 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION --
THE MOST IMPORTANT AND INFLUENTIAL SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL OF THE PAST TWO DECADES
Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene--it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.
Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society. Neuromancer's virtual reality has become real. And yet, William Gibson's gritty, sophisticated vision still manages to inspire the minds that lead mankind ever further into the future.
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Amazon.com Review
Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same. Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price....
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 Hard to follow ( jedihawk )
Pretty good overall, but very difficult to follow. Contains many interesting futuristic concepts, though. I'll not be reading it again.
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 I agree with the praise (for the most part). ( maull07 )
This book was undoubtedly important back in its day; it still has a lot of interesting elements despite the fact it is aging.
What Gibson did here, I think, was to take a Dickian meshing of "real" and artificially created realities and wrap them around upcoming technology, his obsession with hacking and computers, and speculations about what liberal flows of information and technology would mean in a world that inevitably had to be linked up to these things. Throw in a bit of pulp noir, some other superficial speculations, and adapt sci-fi to a Chandleresque style of writing -- well, then you have got this book although I probably did not think of everything.
Therefore, I find it be effective and important, but a couple aspects of it annoy me greatly.
For instance, it does strike me that he is copying Dick's basic ideas in his novels. In "Maze of Death," people in a spaceship collectively hook up into an artificial reality machine that tosses them all into paranoid hell of shifting realities. "Ubik" worked with a similar idea -- where a vindictive individual in a psychiatric ward uses a collective psyche generated by technology to play with reality for everybody within that world.
Gibson actually simplified Dick's aggressive reality bending by making the shifts in reality a product of one system -- cyberspace, a unit of artificial intelligence with two main parts, controlled by one business that was interested in these matters, rather than having multiple people within the book fight with each other over what the true reality is. In this way, he isn't doing anything new -- he is just copying a worthwhile idea and simplifying it from his source, which takes away from the impact of the idea. But it is an effective copy, which is surprising given how hard it is to copy Dick without seeming cartoonish about it.
The style also grates, but it's worth getting used to in order to engage in the book's world. I also get tired of his cool nihilism/pessimism in his worlds, particularly when it comes to people's relation with various technologies. He sees technology as a dangerous fascination, something that often harms the people it comes in contact with. In this sense, he isn't much different from Mary Shelley, who similarly had a problem with technology who played God and the people who tried to control technology as such. It's an old hat thing to do. Getting sermonized about his fear of it underneath the fascination is really irritating.
A final qualm I have is how the biotechnological aspect of it is really not that interesting, but perhaps that is because Cronenberg was working around this time in film pioneering similarly disturbing realities with more self-referential technology involved. And David, despite his negative attitudes toward technology, had a great deal more success with creating intelligent, visceral worlds that grab you from the beginning - particularly with "Videodrome" and the earlier horror films like "Rabid." As it stands, the biotechnological aspect of the novel doesn't improve much on Delany with his "Nova," when people simply jacked into a system to communicate with one another; it is little more than a detail of plot in both cases.
On the whole, I appreciated it and its surprising prescience about many things of the future. I just thought it wasn't as revolutionary as some make it out to be. Still, I highly recommend it to all science-fiction fans since this book does have some profound notions operating the basic cosmologies behind the book's world.
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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.
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 NEUROMANCER by William Gibson ( thepaxdomini )
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.
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If Only Gibson Had Continued With This Story... ( soldieroforange )
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
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