Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Dated? Maybe, but a book to read before you die!, 12 Sep 2006
Like a bullet to the head, Neuromancer (and Gibson) arrived in 1984 to almost universal acclaim and allegedly kick-started the Cyberpunk movement which has influenced certain branches of SF ever since. Whether or not they choose to call their work cyberpunk or not is immaterial. The work of Simon Ings, Grimwood, Chris Moriarty, Michael Swanwick and dozens of others would arguably not have been the same had this novel not been as successful as it was.
The prose is fast, clever, snappy, set against a background of half-working neon in streets where disposable computer equipment is strewn like empty fast food cartons.
Our hero, Case, is a cyber-freelancer, able to jack himself into computer-systems and experience cyberspace as a three dimensional reality. Case, however, tried to steal from one of his more dubious clients who subsequently infected him with a Russian mycotoxin, effectively rendering him incapable of cyberspace work and therefore unemployable. We therefore meet him, down on his luck, and mixing with some rather eccentric characters in a downtown bar in Japan.
For me, it reads like `The Maltese Falcon in Space'. There is a pervasive noir element, since Case - like many a Nineteen-Forties gumshoe - is forced to take on a job, the full details of which he is not fully aware. There's a beautiful and dangerous woman (by the name of Molly) and a mysterious benefactor (who turns out to be a rogue Artificial Intelligence, intent on freeing itself from its security programmes) as well as a supporting cast of neon-lit lowlife.
Like any classic noir novel, the action and the protagonists move between street level and the crazy billionaire family who are literally `above the clouds', since they live within their own Las Vegas style space station.
It's exciting, challenging, dense with atmosphere, and very much deserves its cult status as a modern classic.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
How astonishing!, 21 Aug 1999
By A Customer
William Gibson is the priest of a new culture called the cyberpunk, no doubt about that... That`s the thought you have when you finish this book (you may have to read it twice, though) It`s quite astonishing how Gibson predicts a future which becomes more and more real for us; it`s a world of information overload, a world where globalisation mixes and melts all the cultures of this planet into one, and it`s a world where people try to find their own identy between cyberspace overload and real world horrors such as drugs, yakuza and global pollution. It is an all-time classic, a prediction of a darker future which may await our children and their children. You should read the two sequels as well and for a better understanding it helps to see the film "the matrix" and "johnny mnemonic" (based on a short story of gibson) and, of course, "blade runner". Fritz
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
A brilliant, groundbreaking book., 29 Mar 2005
This is a wonderful book - original, packed with ideas and simply crackling with energy and wit. Gibson has documented incredible, wild vision of the (near) future. It is a world of high technology and low life, a world where designer drugs and surgical enhancements are ubiquitous. In writing this book, he created (or at least popularised) a new genre: cyberpunk.Neuromancer is not perfect. The characterisation is patchy (at best), some of the dialogue is stilted and the plot occasionally meanders but it is a still tremendous piece of work that has stood the test of time quite well. Note that this is the first part of a trilogy and as such leaves a number of questions hanging. The other parts of the trilogy Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are also very good and complete the story nicely.
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