Neuromancer

by William Gibson

Paperback, 2000

Call number

SPEC FICT GIB

Publication

Ace (2000), Edition: Reprint, 288 pages

Description

Case was the sharpest data thief in the matrix--until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction. Neuromancer was the first fully realized glimpse of humankind's digital future--a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Media reviews

A new vocabulary for a transformed reality: the deeply influential cyberpunk classic, 30 years on from its original publication
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I have to apologize for failing to review William Gibson's "Neuromancer" when it appeared last year. I was led to believe I had done Mr. Gibson an injustice when this novel (the author's first) won both of the important 1984 best-of-the-year awards in science fiction: the Nebula and the Hugo. Now
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that I have read the book, I would like to cast a belated ballot for Mr. Gibson.
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knjigainfo.com
Ovo je roman koji je započeo kiberpank revoluciju, prva knjiga koja je dobila sveto trojstvo nagrada u žanru naučne fantastike - Hugo, Nebula i Filip K. Dik. Sa Neuromantom, Vilijem Gibson je predstavio svetu kiberprostor i naučna fantastika više nikada nije bila ista. Gibson je svojim
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romanom najavio sve ono što je došlo godinama kasnije, Internet revoluciju, Matriks filmska trilogiju i neverovatan razvoj informatičkih tehnologija. Kejs je najbolji kompjuterski kauboj koji krstari informatičkim supermagistralama, povezujući svoju svest sa softverom u kiberprostoru, krećući se kroz obilje podataka, pronalazeći tajne informacije za onoga ko može da plati njegove usluge. Kada prevari pogrešne ljude, oni mu se svete na užasan način, uništavajući njegov nervni sistem, mikron po mikron. Proteran iz kiberprostora i zarobljen u svom otupelom telu, Kejs je osuđen na smrt u tehnološkom podzemlju, sve dok ga jednog dana ne angažuju misteriozni poslodavci. Oni mu nude drugu priliku i potpuno izlečenje. Jedini uslov je da prodre u matricu, neverovatno moćnu veštačku inteligenciju kojom upravlja poslovni klan Tezje-Ešpul.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C
I've read this is a landmark book in science fiction, the first "cyberpunk" novel that coined the word cyberspace. Reading this you can see how influential it was--it's impossible to believe those that created the film The Matrix, for instance, didn't read this book. Given this was written in 1984,
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it's impressive for the way it envisioned the centrality of computers and the internet for the future.

I give it high marks for world-building--or at least the suggestion of an imaginative and realized world. Gibson hits you with a lot of unfamiliar terms and concepts to absorb, or familiar words used in unfamiliar ways: cowboys, flipped, kinks, jack in, ice, derms, spindle, trodes, flatline, deck, cores, dub, sprawl, matrix. Yes, you do eventually get some of it from the context, but the book could have used a glossary, and I often felt lost, one reason why I think I felt detached from the story--besides that the prose was choppy, the plot just about impossible to follow.

The book has the feel of film or detective noir--very gritty. (And boy, Gibson is far too fond of the word "soot" the way Meyer is of "sparkle.") Which I think is another reason why I can't rate it higher nor am I inclined to read more Gibson after this; not enough lightness in any sense of the word. I just never connected with the protagonist, Case, or his partner, Molly, who work for and live on the fringes of organized crime. Nothing in the book makes me feel sympathy for either of them or make me feel I've done more than skate over the surfaces of their personalities nor did I feel they changed or grew.

I ended the book with a rather "so what?" feeling. Lots of effort required from the reader and for me not enough payoff.
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LibraryThing member iangreenleaf
Some science fiction ages well, and some does not. I went into this prepared to be disappointed. After a bad run through Haldeman's socially dated The Forever War, I wasn't feeling optimistic about a 1984 book on the subject of computer networks and hacking. In 1984, remember, the Internet was a
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newborn. TCP/IP was two years old. The term "computer virus" was only coined that same year. The first great computer worm wouldn't appear until 1988. Surely, this would be science fiction that doesn't age well.

And yet. And yet! Somehow, against all odds, this book is great. The technology is totally believable (Gibson was smart enough to describe the broader concepts only vaguely, leaving the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps). The vision of the world of cyberspace is eerily accurate, complete with corporate fiefdoms and a new mercenary class of thieves and profiteers. And most importantly, it's a good book. The characters are compelling and complicated and human. The setting has the vibrant hodgepodge that would come to exemplify the cyberpunk genre, little bits of today's society thrown in a blender, amped up, lit in neon. And the plot is gripping the whole way through, each piece of information leading to new questions.


The only thing I can hold against it: the descriptions of cyberspace as a glowing virtual city and the urgency of operators tapping away at their keypads are so evocative that I suspect this book was the origin of all the crap that shows up in every Hollywood hacker movie. Still, that's hardly William Gibson's fault, now is it?
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LibraryThing member richardderus
The Book Report: The seminal work of cyberpunk, the novel was published in 1984 as a mass-market paperback original. It's the story of a twenty-first century dominated by Japanese corporations, feeding off American talent, and dominating a planet only recently recovered (if one can call it that)
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from the most recent pandemic as well as a horrific war between the USSR and the USA. So far, Reality 1, Gibson 0...but wait.

Molly, Case, and Armitage are a weird little unit, chasing after a huge, game-changing paradigm-shifting score: Access to Wintermute, an AI that a powerful family-controlled corporation has...what, blocked up, imprisoned, how does language cope with this? Even Gibson didn't do so well here. Case, the cyber-cowboy, is in the team because he can jack in to the matrix, do the necessary cybercrime, and find the breadcrumbs that will lead to Wintermute. Murderous Molly is the cyber-enhanced muscle, and Armitage of the shady past is the money channel. Though Molly and Case know he's a front for someone(s) else, things just don't add up in his bio. (They turn out to be right, of course.) In the end, though characters walk away, there are not really any survivors of the battles that they must fight. At least, not ones you'd recognize as such.

My Review: My teenaged stepson ordered me to read this book in 1987. Tony wasn't given to thundering pronunciamentoes, so I think it was sheer surprise that made me take it from him and read it. As his mother and I were in the process of disentanglement, I was falling in love with someone wildly inappropriate for me (comme d'habitude), and so on and so on, I think I gave it about 30% of my attention. I shall now quote, in its entirety, the thought I had as I finished the book that year: “*snort*”

You see, I am short on the visionary giftedness tip. The cyberspace that Case inhabits made me roll my eyes, though due to friends in the Austin computer world I got the idea that home computers were going to be huuuge pretty early on. (I chortle now at the level of OOO AAAH we felt when one friend got a 512K hard drive IBM PC!) But Japanese world business dominon? Snort, said I, this time rightly. American innovation remaining preeminent? Snort said I, again correctly. The seeds of destruction weren't hard to see.
But cyberspace, said he to the people he talks to in it, that was a big miss. This beautiful Internet thing that allows us who live so far apart to interact and learn to be a community among ourselves, that idea I missed the implications of and I missed the meat (!) of the book therefore.

It's an important book, I can finally see only 27-1/2 years later, because it both foresaw and called into being the world we live in now. My previous two-star derisive dismissal is herewith retracted, though I still don't think I'll ever revisit this book. I've been wrong about that before, though....
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LibraryThing member name99
Oh god, what a waste of time.

I loathe film noire; the whole stupid set of cliches from the self-destructive anti-hero to the femme fatale to the dark gritty city. And this book is nothing but run-of-the-mill film noire translated fairly mechanically into a sort-of-futuristic universe.

Heck, maybe
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in 1984 it was a great leap forward in terms of imagination (though I fail to see quite what those leaps were), but in 2004 it reads like a sad list of cliches. In particular, the central conceits of the book, namely that computer "hacking", in the sense of penetrating secured computers is best performed via some sort of VR rig, and that the essential contents of a human mind can be captured to silicon to create a living-yet-dead representation of that person, are neither justified nor explored.

This is not an SF book, or at least not what I consider to be a good SF book, in the sense of twisting some aspect of reality slightly through some pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo and then exploring the consequences; rather it concerns itself with its personalities and their story, as in a traditional novel. That might have been fine, had these personalities and their story not been, as I've said, nothing but a set of noire cliches.

I persisted till the very end in the hope that, eventually, there would be some sort of interesting payoff, some sort of culmination of the various threads, but no such luck. If you're the sort who cares more about the mood of a book than the plot, originality, or even that the whole thing makes sense you may love this book. Anyone else, go read a decent author like say Iain M Banks.
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LibraryThing member gypsysmom
Neuromancer was written in 1983 which makes it 27 years old. Unlike some science fiction it does not seem at all dated. There are devices and events that haven't happened but nothing I could see was incapable of happening. Perhaps the only event referred to that shows the time of writing is the
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Screaming Fist episode that Armitage was involved in. It was an ambush in Russia by US special forces to try to destroy the Russian nexus. If Gibson was writing now it might have been China or Korea or even Pakistan. But that's it as far as I could see for letting events at the time of writing colour the events of the future.

Case is a console cowboy (or computer hacker as we would think of him) who tried to take a piece of the pie for himself. His bosses destroyed his ability to connect to cyberspace (a term that didn't exist in 1983 and that Gibson is credited with inventing) so he is living in Japan trying to make a living with illicit substance dealing and using quite a bit himself. He's on a slow trajectory to death. He's virtually broke and he owes a lot of money. When the hired gun Molly tracks him to the coffin room he rents by the week he has just been ripped off by his girlfriend. Molly takes him to meet Armitage who is putting together a team of people with distinctive talents. As Case eventually finds out they are needed to infiltrate the defences of one of the world's major corporations, Tessier-Ashpool. Case and Molly team up to discover who Armitage is and for whom he is working. Case gets his computer networking powers back but Armitage tells him that he has been fitted with small sacs that contain a virus that will put him back into the same position unless he is injected with an antidote that only Armitage has. So it is in Case's best interests to help Armitage complete his job.

Tessier-Ashpool has a powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) named Wintermute. Wintermute is the 'person' who hired Armitage and his gang. The job that Wintermute wants done is to free Wintermute from the bindings that prevent him from acting independently. Although it seemed to me that Wintermute had incredible powers there were a few things it could not do. One of the powers Wintermute had was to appear to Case and the others as a person they knew in real life. These constructs would help or motivate the team members because they seemed real.

I can see how this book won all the SF awards going at the time it was published. It's an incredibly detailed and imaginative work. I'm glad I finally took the opportunity to read it. IMDb says there is a movie in production due for release in 2011. That should be interesting to see.
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LibraryThing member myfanwy
I have had a love/hate relationship with sci-fi for some time now. It can be so good at its best, but the writing can be so infuriating at its worst. So, I've taken to taking recommendations, and Neuromancer, by anyone's calculations, is one of the most influential of sci-fi novels.

...and I can see
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why. There's not much I can say about Neuromancer. It is the Matrix, and SnowCrash, and Hackers, and every other techno-adventure all rolled up into one. Chiba City is reflected in the movie version of Blade Runner. People "jack in" with a socket in the back of their heads. There's a hell of a lot of black leather and a hot girl and a gifted but clueless hacker intent on saving them all. And through all of it, there's the written style of a beat poet, making hacking into the new art of the millennium.

I only wish that I had read this in two sittings, or even one. It's meant to be read in one fell swoop. It races against the clock. I may have to read it again just to get that headlong rush. But at least Neuromancer reminded me what it's like to have a book I can't put down, one that I read while I'm walking because I want to take every free moment I have to get to the end. It's delirious, trippy, smart, poetic and a hell of a lot of fun.

Yeah man, yeah.
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LibraryThing member JollyContrarian
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a
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valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.
But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.
Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.
They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.
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LibraryThing member edgeworth
Neuromancer was the book that spawned cyberpunk. It predicted the Internet, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and more, on a grand and relatively accurate scale, despite being written in 1984 on a typewriter. So excellent and influential is this book that it won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip
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K. Dick awards, and (I think) remains the only novel to have taken all three in a single year.

Set amidst the grimy, dystopian cityscapes of Tokyo, Istanbul and the “Sprawl” of the American north-east, Neuromancer tells the story of a washed-up computer hacker named Case who is hired by a mysterious ex-serviceman to work on the ultimate hack. But the story takes a backseat to the atmosphere and tone of the novel; Neuromancer is more about style than substance. Set in a world that seems so outlandishly fantastic in its technology, and yet believably real in its circumstances - uncontrolled consumerism, utopian space stations the domain of plutocrats, soldiers betrayed by upper levels of government - it’s one of the most well-realised fictional worlds I’ve ever read.

This is mostly due to Gibson’s masterful command of language. There are certain authors who have an ability to weave words into a beautifully visual description: Philip Reeve was the first one I noticed, but Michael Chabon and Cormac McCarthy have it too, and now I’m adding William Gibson to my personal list.

The Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed Maelcum’s pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed.

Another great touch was that Gibson never explicitly details the world of Neuromancer, but rather throws in tiny bits here and there to fill in the background:

“Saw a horse in Maryland once,” the Finn said, “and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There’s Arabs still trying to code ‘em up from the DNA, but they always croak.”

Much like Watchmen, this ultimately creates a very realistic world while also forcing the reader to use their imagination.

There are times in Neuromancer when the fictional techno-jargon can get confusing, where you’re not exactly sure what’s going on or where the characters are, but these minor issues would probably go away after a few re-reads. There are also a few moments where the 80’s seeps through in a manner reminiscent of Back to the Future 2: the “internet” of Case’s world, for example, is a virtual cyberspace of neon gridworks. I haven’t even seen Tron, but that is just so Tronnish that it hurts. On the whole, however, Gibson did an excellent job of preventing this novel from dating - which can be an incredibly hard thing to do, as I’ve learned with my own ventures into science fiction. I’ll definitely be picking up some more of his works.
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LibraryThing member keywestnan
Every man I know of my generation, including my husband, thinks of this as an extremely important book. I liked it -- but it struck me as noir as much as anything and I had the same problem I often have with darkish crime novels -- it's hard to emotionally invest in characters who are just hellbent
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on destroying themselves and their surroundings. I also don't know if, from this perspective, I properly appreciated Gibson's visionary understanding of how networked computers would change our future. I was struck, too, by how much of his vision was incorporated into the Matrix movies. Perhaps the Wachowski brothers have credited Gibson. I certainly hope so.
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LibraryThing member TheBentley
Not much can be said about Neuromancer that hasn't been said before. Like Hitchcock's Psycho, Neuromancer is a work that it's hard for truly modern readers to appreciate. The best I can do is remind younger readers that when Gibson wrote this book, none of this had EVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. In 1984,
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there was no world wide web, no MMORPG's, no Second Life or anything like it. It has been suggested that Neuromancer was so influential that it actually CREATED those things--or at least created the desire to create those things. Whether it's true that Gibson created the motivation for actual cyberspace or only saw its inevitability in existing technology, there's no doubt that without this seminal work, we wouldn't be CALLING it cyberspace--oh, and there would be no Matrix movies. Aside from its influence, Neuromancer manages to also be simply a good book. No one can set the scene like Gibson, especially when the scene is something that's never been seen in real life. It's a challenging read, especially if you're the sort of reader who wants to nail down every point before moving on to the next. Like Pyncheon, Gibson will run off and leave you if you let him, but you're probably "getting it" more than you think you are. The best recommendation I can give any reader for reading any Gibson novel--and this one in particular--is that it must be read fast. While Gibson can turn a phrase as beautifully as any writer out there, what he does best is create fleeting images. Neuromancer is a roller coaster ride, and if you pause to study the scenery, you will lose the entire thread of the thing. Devote a weekend to it. Accept that you can't examine every set-piece with the care you'd like the first time through, and enjoy the ride.
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LibraryThing member dom_oh
Just couldn't get into this one. Poorly defined characters, thought the writing didn't flow and I should admit that I just didn't get it, it went completely over my head. But looking at the other reviews I wasn't the only one who found this!
LibraryThing member melydia
This was described to me as the archetypal cyberpunk novel. And perhaps it is. The world was interesting, the characters were dynamic, and the view of the future was familiar yet radically different. However, I had a terrible time following the storyline. I got what happened in a general sense, but
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there was still some stuff that went over my head. Like what happened to Wintermute at the end. So honestly I'm not sure if I'd recommend this book to anyone else, because I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. Perhaps I should reread it sometime.
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LibraryThing member StephenBarkley
I decided to brush up on my sci-fi history by reading this archetypal Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick award winning Cyberpunk novel. I’ve already read Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, so I knew a bit of what to expect. What I found was Gibson in his raw unpolished brilliance. You would
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expect a twenty-five year old book about the future to feel dated. However, aside from a few exceptions, it felt remarkably current. This novel lives up to its reputation.

The prose is dreamlike, blurring the lines between action and reflection—much like the plot blurs the lines between real and virtual reality. You need to pay attention while reading it to keep track of the characters, but the payoff is worth it. The story stays with you once the book’s back on the shelf.

Few things are more satisfying than reading a classic that exceeds your expectations.
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LibraryThing member rretzler
I won't go into a synopsis of the book, as many people have already summarized it, and much better than I ever could. For those of you who are not aware, Neuromancer won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K Dick award, the first book to have ever achieved all three honors. Gibson was responsible
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for coining the term cyberspace in another short story, and here, his protagonist, Case, jacks into the matrix. Yes, this book influenced the Wachowski's film, The Matrix.

Keep in mind that this book was written in 1983. For those of you who do not recall technology in 1983, there wasn't much available for the general population. The internet (or matrix, if you will) was first developed in the late 1960s but wasn't expanded upon until the early 1980s when the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced. Its usage was mainly limited to research and educational organizations at that time. It wasn't until 1989 that the first commercial dial-up service was introduced in the US. Personal computers were first introduced in 1977, and were becoming more popular in the early 1980s, but it wasn't until the 1990s that Microsoft and Apple developed the operating systems that were to make computers common in many households. I took my first computer class in college in 1983. I was just at the time when programming was switching from input via punch cards to actually typing in code via a terminal. The terminal was attached to a large mainframe computer located at a central location on campus.

Reading the book today gives one a different appreciation than it would have when the book was first released. It is amazing to me now because, in a sense, Gibson gave us a little peek into the future. From an early 1980s standpoint, this was an entirely different type of book. Cyberpunk was born - a combination of the cyberspace of the internet and the punk movement which had come into being in the late 1970s.

So...from that standpoint the book was fantastic to me. On the other hand, I was confused for the first part of the book. It was difficult for me to understand what was going on. Interestingly, I was reading about the "singularity" the other day, and the article's author thought that perhaps when AI becomes sentient, humans will not understand, as the AI will be capable of unlimited intelligence. Maybe Gibson understood this and deliberately made the beginnings of the book confusing. I really could not identify with the two major characters, Case and Molly. I could find no common ground with them, so it was difficult for me actually to care what happened to them throughout the book. I've never been a big fan of cyberpunk and given a choice I would read soft sci-fi instead of hard, so I was probably a little predisposed not to like the book based on my particular reading preferences. As far as the plotting, aside from the confused feeling at the beginning, I felt that it did move along fairly well. I won't give away any spoilers, but I did like the ambiguity of the ending.

I used Amazon whisper sync partially to listen to, but mainly to read, Neuromancer. I would NOT recommend the narrator, Robertson Dean. I had tried several times to start listening to the book but never got very far. His voice was flat with little inflection, and the way he read the female characters really bugged me.

From a standpoint of what Neuromancer gave to science fiction, I think the book deserves five stars. However, in my opinion, reading the book just for my pleasure, I would give it three stars. Hence, a 4-star rating.
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LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Written more than twenty years ago, Neuromancer by William Gibson is the classic cyberpunk novel that started a new genre of science fiction. It is also notable in that it one all three awards for science fiction writing, the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award. Our book group discussion of this
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classic work provided some insight, but no consensus as to the overall appeal or success of the book. For me the book was best in its' demonstration of the power of imagination, bringing such concepts as cyberspace and artificial intelligence to the foreground in science fiction that they continue to have to this day. While the plot had complexity and maintained a high level of excitement, I felt the characters lacked depth and often veered toward a flatness of almost machine-like quality. This may be what the author intended, but it did not make the book a better read. Overall I found this a worthwhile book to read, but will not add it to my list of favorites.
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LibraryThing member drardavis
If this was the start of Gibson’s “career in the imaginary future” it was a really good start. Thirty-five years later I read this as research for my own novel, which is going in a different direction with respect to artificial intelligences. Gibson’s hero asks one of his villains, “Are
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you sentient or not?” The answer is, “Well it feels like I am. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions.” And it is the philosophical questions blurred behind the constant action and technobabble of Gibson’s story that give it such staying power.
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LibraryThing member hoppmaep
Interesting as a historical artifact, it's easy to see Neuromancer's influences in the cyberpunk works to follow. Imaginative. Judged on its own, however, I find it to be a truly perplexing book. Character motives are largely unexplored, and characters seem to lack any internal conflict about the
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rather radical path they have fallen upon, or the impacts of their choices. Relationships feel empty at times and like the author's fantasy at others. A worthwhile read for what it is, but wouldn't hold up if it weren't such a foundational work.
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LibraryThing member andrewa121
For anyone steeped in the genre of science fiction and its cyberpunk subgenre, this novel has a mythical status. It is widely regarded as the seminal work in the genre; Gibson is credited with coining the term "cyberspace" and any work that proclaims itself to be cyberpunk is inevitably judged
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against Neuromancer, the upshot being that as far as cyberpunk aficionados are concerned, the book is a revealed text, laying out the dogma to which all future works, in order to call themselves cyberpunk, must to some degree adhere. All the weight and reverence afforded this novel makes approaching it a daunting task. Fortunately, I have never been an avid science fiction reader and was thus largely ignorant of the buzz surrounding the novel. As such, I think I was able to more critically examine the novel while at the same time experience it with a sort of naïve wonder. So with this disclaimer out of the way, letting you know where I'm coming from, here are a few thoughts.

The tone of Gibson's work is firmly inspired by Philip K. Dick, but relies on a much more concrete science fiction, rooted in emerging (some now completely emerged) technologies. Or maybe this just seems to be the case due to the fact that so many of the technological devices Gibson uses to create his world have become so vital in our world today. Gibson's focus on simulation v. reality and machine v. consciousness provides an axon bridging the gap (at least chronologically) between Dick and more modern, accessible cyberpunk best epitomized in the public consciousness with Snow Crash in literature and The Matrix in film. As with Dick's work, reading Neuromancer was like receiving a text through a fog. The constant flashes from reality into virtual worlds are jarring, disconcerting, and disruptive to the narrative flow. Which is, I would think, exactly what Gibson wants, as it reflects the mental state of the characters: alienated, bifurcated, and overall just confused. While this didn't make for the most readable of books, the mental gymnastics required and the engrossing world that Gibson creates—not to mention the philosophical questions the novel poses—make for a book that'll leave a mark on the reader, and has definitely left its mark on literature, opening up a fascinating subgenre that can be simultaneously mindbending and thrilling.
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LibraryThing member honeyrococo
I think I am the only person who found this book to be really hopeful and uplifting. Despite the fact that it is a very dark novel in which terrible things are happening, I thought it was nice to think that no matter how oppressive our governments and corporations become, there will aways be ways
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to breach the system, to hack in and lay claim to technology in a sort of evolutionary progression of niche adaptation. I always want there to be hackers in my world -- the only people who might someday save us from this impending nightmare of totalitarian tracking and control.

That said, I am not a sci-fi or mystery or fantasy buff and one of the delights of reading this book for me as a reader was recognizing all the allusions to great works of literature. Gibson really is a great writer. I also like the fact that in an interview Gibson said that he wrote the whole thing on an old typewriter and if he'd had a computer at the time this never would have been written because he projected a great romance onto computers which they didn't live up to at the time. When, after making some money off Neuromancer sales, he bought his first computer, he was dismayed by the fact it made a whiring noise -- it seemed like a primitive machine and not the magical technology he had made of it.
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LibraryThing member jsnrcrny
William Gibson's Neuromancer is interesting specifically for the world the author creates with it. The plot is difficult to follow, however. Gibson seems to take for granted a patient reader who is comfortable with confusion and willing to move forward in a narrative without having a clear idea of
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what is going on.

The plot emerges as a series of fragmented conversations and vague references to missions, training, technologies, and equipment. It is surprising, however, how I was able to approximate a plot based upon these disparate elements without a more directive, connect-the-dots sort of narrator. In many ways the aesthetic technique of the novel is as unique as the world Gibson develops here.

One element of the the novel that is really great is the cast of characters. The characters are quite memorable. Case, Molly, Armitage, Maelcum, Wintermute, Riviera, 3Jane: the characters seem to have rich developed backgrounds, and they seem be fully realized (although you only glimpse them partially).

As a foundational text for the cyber-punk sub-genre, it should be read.
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LibraryThing member the_hag
Well, this one falls into the genre of reading I don’t normally go for…but I was intrigued by a review on the 50 book challenge where the author compared this, A Brave New World and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep, the whole thing intrigued me, so I set out to get copies of all three and
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read them. So far I have this one and have requested A Brave New World from paperback swap; hopefully it will be here soon. I’ll have to pick up a copy of Electric Sheep from Amazon or somewhere else, pbs doesn’t have any listed right now.

Any way, this book was OK to my way of thinking…not because of the plot or characters (which were very gritty and dark…well done), but because it just wasn’t very readable. I found myself confused in several places and overall it just was a “rough” read, it didn’t flow smoothly for me. I can see why it won awards, but it just didn’t reach out and grab me as something I could read more than once. I’m glad I read it, because now I can actually have a knowledgeable conversation when this books comes up, instead of that glassy eyed look I usually have…so that is a bonus in and of itself.
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LibraryThing member polarbear123
I may well review the score I have given this novel. Yes I know it is a classic of sci-fi and I am by no meas an expert on the subject. This is of course a very intelligent and multi layered book and Gibson has created perhaps one of the most fully realised worlds of the future. All too often the
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future appears in novels to be too closely related an recognisable to people of the present. here we are confronted with a world that is at times unrecognisable and unfathomable, as are some passages in the book. After a while I didn't bother to fight it and like case I let things wash over me every once in a while. I am sure that when I return to this novel I will understand it more and I really want to but as it stands it did frustrate me at times and that is the only reason for the lower score. Please don't cast me out of the sci-fi community.
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LibraryThing member dreamweaversunited
My favorite part of this book was the description. The author has such a way with words. From the very first sentence I knew this would be a immersive book to engage all the senses.The reason for the 3-star review is that I found all the characters besides Case and Molly to be poorly drawn, and the
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plot was very confusing. I'm still not sure what the difference is between Wintermute and Neuromancer, and why Case worked for one and not the other.
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LibraryThing member andyjb
Go to be honest and say that although I can see why this is an important book I didn't really get on with it. Found it a bit tedious and the cyber punk language made it a bit of a slog.
LibraryThing member nakedsushi
William Gibson's Neuromancer is what many have said a shining example of the cyberpunk genre. Some have even said it's one of the books that started it all. The man practically coined the term 'the Matrix' in this book. I've always been interested in sci fi stories whether they're from books,
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movies, or television shows, so it felt necessary that I read a book that's so highly regarded by people who also like sci-fi.

On a superficial level, Neuromancer is a caper story that takes place in a gritty, futuristic setting. Its protagonist, Case, is what we would think of as a hacker. Where we first pick up in the story, Case has lost the ability to hack because an enemy of his destroyed a part of his nervous system and prevents him from hooking into cyberspace. He is then propositioned by a mysterious man who restores his ability to hack, but only if Case is willing to do something for him.

Once readers delve deeper, the story is actually about artificial intelligence, technology, and what it means to be a living, breathing, human being. This may not seem like much, but take this into context: the novel was written in 1984, a time when few people had computers in their home and the world wide web was just a faint glimmer in Al Gore's imagination. With that in mind, it's amazing that Gibson crafted such a shockingly accurate tale of what the future (or the present, now) might be.

Admittedly, I did not really feel attached to this book until I read 1/3 of the way through. Gibson's prose is so rich and dense that it's hard to read quickly at first. He describes things in such detail that sometimes it seemed like I was reading paragraphs and paragraphs but nothing really happened. His techno-babble was also hard to keep up with, but I eventually stopped fighting it and trying to make sense of it; I just let it flow past me.

Having read it so late in my life and after having read and watched so many stories influenced by Neuromancer, I was disappointed I didn't read it sooner. Maybe it's good that I didn't read it till now -- I might not have understood a lot of what was written if I had this in my early teens, but I think my mind would have been blown if I hadn't known of the hype surrounding this book. Despite the overblown expectations, I still enjoyed the book for what it was.
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Pages

288

ISBN

0441007465 / 9780441007462
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