Gibson had his finger on the pulse of the future of networked computing (“cyberspace”) and human augmentation with cybernetics (still “cutting edge” technology) so it doesn’t feel like it was written three decades ago.Īt its core, Neuromancer is a heist story. In this case, I think we’re closer to living at the threshold of Gibson’s story than being past it, so it’s actually fun to read right now. It’s really hard to look at older SciFi (and I can’t believe I’m saying that 33 years ago constitutes “older” but I digress) in the context of a current worldview when many times the “futuristic” technology of the story has been superseded by existing technology. Throw in a little game called Shadowrun and you’ve got the makings for a massively popular sub-genre on your hands.Īs with any science fiction, it’s important to look at it in the context of the time it was written and published. Insomuch as I can be introduced to a genre that has skyrocketed in popularity in the last twenty years (especially after the success of a little 1999 film called The Matrix, which unapologetically borrows a ton of its concept from Neuromancer). I sought to remedy that and social media universally told me I should read this book as my introduction to the genre. I had personally never read Neuromancer or really any cyberpunk.

In a world that way more approximates the imagined world of Neuromancer, it is important to look back at the originators from time to time.

Dick Awards, Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future-a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

The winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. Henry Dorsett Case was the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus-hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace…

Enjoy your stay and mind the new carpets.

Necromancer book william gibson