The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . .
- Title: Neuromancer
- Author: William Gibson
- Genre: Science Fiction/Cyberpunk
- Year: 1984
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” is the immortal opening line of one of the most influential science fiction novels of the second half of the twentieth century. William Gibson’s Neuromancer may not be the very first SF novel to contain cyberpunk elements, but for its totality of vision, its vividness of detail and breadth of imagination, and its stylishly evocative writing that manages to combine the clipped cadence and cynicism of noir with the lyrical pyrotechnics of the New Wave, Neuromancer not only stands alone as the foundational work of an entire sub-genre of SF, but as a book that would change the way nearly all subsequent science fiction would be written.
One-time ace hacker Case is down-and-out in Chiba City (near Tokyo, Japan) at the start of the novel. Drug-addicted, marked for death, Case is a fallen angel — a man who once soared the data-streams of the matrix who is now reduced to an existence locked within his own meat thanks to a Russian mycotoxin that burned-out his ability to interface with a cyberspace deck. Case searches Chiba City’s illegal clinics for a cure, all while hustling the street as a low-level black market operator. His luck is just about up when he is grabbed by Molly, a razorgirl, a woman with augmented reflexes and mirrorshade eyes. She involves him in an operation that gets Case back to hacking cyberspace — courtesy of an extensive neurosystem rebuild that lets Case return to his role of computer cowboy and plug his mind directly into the matrix.
That’s just the start, and already Neuromancer ushers in words and concepts that are now an integral part of our culture. ‘Cyberspace’ is first used here, and the term ‘the matrix’ given its highest profile until the Wachowski brothers launched it into orbit. Such branding makes cyberpunk fiction feel imminently real, and Gibson’s gritty near-future is powerful enough to taste. In such locations as Chiba City, or the massive conurbation stretching from Boston to Atlanta called ‘the Sprawl,’ or even in the cobbled together outlaw sections of an orbiting space station, run-down urban environments juxtaposed against unglamorous technologies present a bleak human future. This isn’t a world of flying cars and teleportation and ray guns, but rather of organ grafts and wetware skull-sockets and simstim virtual reality interfaces.
Case fits right in. Scrawny, addicted, damaged, he moves all over the world with his new team, gradually assembling the pieces of the puzzle that will reveal just who they are working for, and for what. It’s not that he has much choice, as his employer has installed sacs of slowly dissolving mycotoxins in his system which will put Case right back where he started — trapped inside his own body and unable to interface with the matrix. On the way he encounters a sociopathic illusionist, a ROM construct of his dead mentor, a pair of wayward AIs, and a clan of clones that take intervals in cryosleep. Gibson’s world is polyglot and globalized, full of brand names at once familiar and slightly exotic, and grounded in abundant details that lend it a vivid, lived-in shabbiness. It’s the kind of near-future world you wouldn’t at all be surprised to find yourself living in, one day.
In the end, Case confronts the central theme of the book head-on: what does it mean to be human? In a world of biological computers and technological intelligences, where is the line between human and non-human, real and virtual, drawn? There are no easy answers here, but Neuromancer frames the question as intelligently and imaginatively as any book of the last thirty years, and does so with a kind of layered depth and self-awareness that rewards repeated reading. For its amazingly drawn setting, its clever extrapolation of current technologies into the near future, and its smart look at how technology is forcing us to reframe the fundamental questions at the heart of human philosophy, Neuromancer is a must-read book.
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Heya! I said did you write that review it so gooooooood! But it was too bad I couldn’t understand becuase I’m not as top notch as you writing! That was good! heya, your on my buddies page!
Celeste_2sweet!
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