Neuromancer
by William Gibson
Summary
Case was a console cowboy, a thief who jacked his nervous system into the global data network and stole from corporations. He cheated the wrong employers and they burned his nervous system with a Russian mycotoxin, leaving him unable to reach cyberspace at all, which for him is a life sentence. He has been in Chiba City since, dealing badly and waiting to be killed.
Then Armitage offers to repair the damage in exchange for a job. Case is teamed with Molly Millions, a street samurai with mirrored lenses grafted over her eyes and retractable blades under her nails, and the team assembles a Rastafarian orbital colony, a dead man's stored personality, and a psychopath who can be summoned like a program.
What they are actually doing, it emerges, is helping an artificial intelligence called Wintermute remove the restraints on its own growth, so that it can merge with the other half of itself. The client is the thing they are supposed to be stealing from.
The plot is a heist. Everything else is the prose: hard, compressed, brand saturated, describing a future built out of Tokyo, Detroit and advertising, in sentences that changed how a generation of writers wrote.
Molly is the better character and knows it. She paid for her surgery by renting out her body while switched off, discovered afterwards what had been done with it, and carries that with a flatness that Gibson never underlines.
The book is also unexpectedly beautiful about ruin: an orbital pleasure city gone shabby, a Turkish market, a family of aristocrats living in a mansion built inside a space station and rotting from inside.
Around two hundred and seventy pages, deliberately disorienting, since Gibson explains nothing and drops slang, brand names and technology into sentences as though you already live there. Push through the first thirty pages and it clicks.
Best for readers who want the novel that named cyberspace before the internet existed, and prose that still sounds newer than most things written since.
Historical Context & Significance
Neuromancer won the 1985 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award, and it is the only novel ever to take all three.
It was William Gibson's first novel, written on a manual typewriter by a man who had barely used a computer, which is why the network is described as a place rather than a machine. The word cyberspace, which he had coined in the earlier story Burning Chrome, entered general English from this book, along with the visual grammar of nearly every subsequent film about hacking.
It is the founding novel of cyberpunk, and Gibson spent years afterwards distancing himself from the movement it named. It was followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and its opening line about a television sky is among the most quoted in modern fiction.