Strangely amazing, this book made me a cyberpunk fan.

I have to admit that the only reason I initially picked this up was because a friend recently got me addicted to the card game Android: Net Runner and recommended this book as a way to understand the theme of the game better. Anytime someone's talking about the cyberpunk genre, it's almost a guarantee that this book will come up. It's a classic cyberpunk story, set in a future where enormously powerful, multinational corporations fight each other for power and technology and hackers are hired to break into a virtual reality matrix where the corporations' secrets are stored. This constant struggle between hacker and corporation has many people playing a very dangerous game.

The main premise of Neuromancer is that a young man named Henry Case has been recruited by a mysterious benefactor to make an extremely difficult "run" on a corporation's servers. Case had been a hacker working for a criminal organization until he made the mistake of stealing from his employers.



"Of course he was welcome, they hold him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because - still smiling - they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh."

Case makes a living on the streets doing the most dangerous jobs and not giving a shit if he lives or dies. Then, he's given a second chance: make a run on this AI, and we'll get you back to your old cyberspace cowboy ways. So Case, guided by a mentally unstable war hero and protected by a street samurai named Molly, takes on the impossible mission in the hopes of finally getting his life back.



I will admit right now that I know I didn't understand all the intricacies of the world that Gibson crafts here but it's so fascinating that it didn't keep me from enjoying the ride. Gibson's writing is strange and beautiful at the same time. I fell in love within the first chapter and despite struggling to understand some of the technological aspects of it, I had a hard time putting it down. It slows down a bit in the middle but the first and last thirds are so fascinating that I never struggled for long.

I don't often read sci-fi so I've been hesitant to pick up some of the classics. Thanks to Gibson, I won't hesitate with any more cyberpunk stories, this was absolutely brilliant!

the power of sci-fi is to present something as dense and abstract as this novel and still imbue it with shockingly realistic and relatable moments of humanity. at what point do we stop pretending that novels centered around AI are completely fictional?

this is also the first time (since school, at least) that i've taken my time to annotate as i read, paying attention to certain themes, motifs, and noting passages that felt significant to me for one reason or another. what a rewarding experience.

loved this and will 100% be picking up the second one in the series.