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....

Product Description
Hired to break into the virtually inaccessible computer network of a large corporation, Case, the world's finest interface cowboy, and Molly, a street-smart samurai, venture deep into cyberspace only to discover that they have become pawns in a deadly game.

I enjoyed the book the way one might enjoy a big Hollywood movie. The characterizations and plot were shallow and taken directly from noir and pulp fictions, no doubt about it. However, for all the times I've seen noir plots, I still enjoy them. I think the author made things fun, and kept the story going along smoothly. The ending did fall a little flat, but cyberpunk as a genre seems to flop the endings, and this was at least decent.

Also, I think it's easy to appreciate the futuristic setting of the book. True, it's a largely outdated view of the future, but it's an interesting world, and it's fun to see just how much Gibson got right back in 1984. I read this when I stayed live in post-bubble Osaka, and the book's view of the fringes of an efficient high-tech society struck a chord with me.


Undoubtedly influencial, but annoying to read   April 6, 2002
 43 out of 76 found this review helpful

When a book introduces a new sub-genre, it obviously has ideas that are new, fresh, and exciting. However, on hindsight, Neuromancer is flawed in many ways. Clearly the whole cyberpunk genre arose from this book (just look at modern dystopic movies and computer games that borrow liberally from Gibson's language and plot points). For this reason, I would recommend the book. In addition, the story is actually quite good. Although I normally don't like or believe in futures this pessimistic, Gibson gave his world a kind of logic that allows belief.

Unfortunately, he then destroys the credibility at key points in the narrative. It is deeply irritating to me when an author sets up a self-consistent, logical (even scientific) world, and then decides (s)he likes an image or idea so much that it must be included, even if physically/scientifically impossible (Samuel Delany is the worst transgressor of this offense). I found myself rereading a number of passages in disbelief before concluding that yes, Gibson was indeed defying one law of physics while rigorously adhering to others at the same time. In addition, Gibson kept introducing new concepts and words invented from thin air, when there are perfectly acceptable words in use today. Okay, so he's trying to invent a new slang, but nowhere are the new words defined. You learn them from context, but the context may be several chapters away.

Gibson's narrative laziness crops up in his use of pronouns as well - there are passages that are simply incomprehensible because the author refers to all the characters (even those fighting each other) by pronouns. A typical passage would be something like: "She burst into the room just as she was getting up from the table." Is the person bursting into the room and the person getting up from the table the same? And if so, isn't it physically impossible to do both things at the same time? Thus, it was with mounting irritation that I approached the climax to the story.

Therefore, while I can recommend this book on an historical basis, or because it has an interesting plot (and the occasional interesting character), I do so with serious reservations due to the infuriatingly lazy writing style.


cyberpunk........i think.   August 13, 2002
 41 out of 61 found this review helpful

Perhaps the only thing worse than reading a bad book is reading a book that has the blaring potential to be great, but somehow falls short.

"Neuromancer" is filled with thoughts, images, and scenes which are nothing short of brilliant and ground-breaking. Written in 1984, Gibson's ability to imagine the future of technology amazes me. He doesn't craft "Star Trek" worlds--idealized, raceless, places where everybody gets along (although we all love Star Trek, one must admit that its character interaction is a little less than realistic). Neither does Gibson let his technology get out of hand--people can't travel faster than light, nobody mates with aliens, or has an epiphany about the nature of the universe. It's Earth, plain and simple (although it's obvious he wrote it in the middle of the Decade of Excess--mirrored surgical optical insets? ick.). The man who coined the term "Cyberspace" creates a complex future which is ultimately believable.

Unfortunately--and this is where the rating part comes in-- as I was reading, I found myself stopping every page or two, scratching my temple, and going "HUH?" Listen, guys, before you tell me I'm just slamming the novel because it's popular, let's put it into perspective. I'm an experienced reader. I've been able to read Kerouac, Murakami, Vonnegut, and other notoriously confusing writers' works without a hitch. For a few identifiable and probably a few more unidentifiable reasons, "Neuromancer" gave me problems.

I realize it's a matter of style more than anything; Gibson wants to set an atmosphere by using particular words, sentence structures, and chronology techniques. However, the effect is something like that of a dress produced for a fashion show--what looks great on the runway is not necessarily practical or feasible for everyday life. For short bursts, Gibson's prose is lucid, vivid, and startling. However, taken in chunks much longer than a page, the gaps in action frustrate even a patient reader. There were times when I absolutely, positively could not follow what was going on, even after stopping and rereading several times. The experience was similar to trying to solve a puzzle with a hundred pieces missing. The prose, or lack thereof, probably cut my enjoyment of the novel in half.

"Neuromancer", however, is still a ground-breaking book, with so much insight and so many redeeming qualities that I'd still reccomend any SF fan read it. I just wish that Gibson had had a better understanding of prose and literary technique to make his ideas and images _really_ shine.


I knew it...   January 27, 2003
 37 out of 50 found this review helpful

I knew that when I finished this book, 15 minutes ago, that I would find exactly the sorts of comments here that I have in fact encountered. My own feelings go back and forth, like my feelings on the new Phish album: it's great; it's terrible; no, it's great; no, it's terrible. Here's my take.

Well, people who are not good at reading, and you can usually identify them first through spelling errors, hated the book. People who are really into the "alternate worlds" thing think it's super cool. I find both of these positions to be ignorant and one-sided. One is just as bad as the other. The jargon was, to me, not too difficult to figure out, and I think it worked better than, or at least as well as (in its own way), the indecipherable slang of "A Clockwork Orange," by Anthony Burgess. The point here is, the slang of Gibson's world IS technical jargon. Hmm. There's an idea. Gibson has given us a world that, despite his stumblings and fumblings in telling the story (which English majors like myself might--MIGHT--be willing to consider a stylistic choice on the part of the author, to add to the sense of darkness and confusion), seems REAL. It is a very, very human world, and this is a very human novel. It is about identity in a world with no higher purposes than gratification of needs and desires; even you churchgoers out there might get the idea sometimes in the back of your mind that even religion serves only to gratify and soothe, to take our attention away from the essential horror and loneliness of the human condition. What is the motivation of any character in this novel? Gratification of desire, extension of life, money, etc. The "cyberpunk" elements of the book are, to me, incidental to what is at its core a poem about solitude, impermanence, and the shifting sands of human life. What is the last line of the book?

"He never saw Molly again."

This is not a good book, or a bad one. It is what Hemingway might have called a "true book"--one that touches a fundamental truth about the circumstances in which we find ourselves, here on this ball of dust and water, fighting our all-too-short battles against the relentless parade of entropy, and its child, loss. The good is good, and the bad is bad, yin is yin and yang is yang, but remember the symbol of the two opposites--one is defined by the other, and neither has the advantage.


Simply Put: Great Science Fiction   November 19, 2002
 30 out of 32 found this review helpful

'Neuromancer' is one of a handful of books/movies that I would pick to represent the science-fiction genre. Gibson succeeds on all levels here - I enjoyed the story, the characters, the settings, the technology, everything. Gibson writes about imperfection - he doesn't gloss anything over or try to make it too pretty. The characters are flawed, and have weaknesses - just like in real life. They live in a gritty world - just like in real life. And around them all, is technology - just like in real life.

'Neuromancer' is the story of Case: a hacker-type, cyberpunk, whatever you want to call him. He makes hackers of today look like amateurs - he totally immerses himself into the machine. Washed-up and raked over the coals, he gets a chance at a come back, even if it isn't on the most pleasant of terms.

Read this book if you are a science fiction fan - if for no other reason than to see what all the hype is about. I don't think you'll be disappointed.