Goodreads | Neuromancer (Ace Science Fiction) by William Gibson

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5		37%
4		35%
3		19%
2		5%
1		1%

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SciFi and Fantasy...: What I am also reading in December	10	34	1 hour, 36 min ago
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The Book Challenge: Lilliputian's 2008 Book Challenge List!	193	181	1 day ago, 10:31AM
SciFi and Fantasy...: Other Works by Gibson	7	25	2 days ago, 06:38PM

Loren rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

01/30/08

Read in January, 1993

Adapted from ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com

The first time I tried to read Neuromancer, I stopped around page 25.

I was about 15 years old and I’d heard it was a classic, a must-read from 1984. So I picked it up and I plowed through the first chapter, scratching my head the whole time. Then I shoved it onto my bookshelf, where it was quickly forgotten. It was a dense, multilayered read, requiring more effort than a hormone-addled adolescent wanted to give. But few years later, I pulled t...more Adapted from ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com

The first time I tried to read Neuromancer, I stopped around page 25.

I was about 15 years old and I’d heard it was a classic, a must-read from 1984. So I picked it up and I plowed through the first chapter, scratching my head the whole time. Then I shoved it onto my bookshelf, where it was quickly forgotten. It was a dense, multilayered read, requiring more effort than a hormone-addled adolescent wanted to give. But few years later, I pulled the book down and gave it another chance. This time, William Gibson’s dystopic rabbit hole swallowed me whole.

Neuromancer is basically a futuristic crime caper. The main character is Case, a burnt-out hacker, a cyberthief. When the book opens, a disgruntled employer has irrevocably destroyed parts of his nervous system with a mycotoxin, meaning he can’t jack into the matrix, an abstract representation of earth’s computer network. Then he receives a suspiciously sweet offer: A mysterious employer will fix him up if he’ll sign on for a special job. He cautiously agrees and finds himself joined by a schizophrenic ex-Special Forces colonel; a perverse performance artist who wrecks havoc with his holographic imaginings; a long-dead mentor whose personality has been encoded as a ROM construct; and a nubile mercenary with silver lenses implanted over her eyes, retractable razors beneath her fingernails and one heckuva chip on her shoulder. Case soon learns that the target he’s supposed to crack and his employer and are one and the same -- an artificial intelligence named Wintermute.

Unlike most crime thrillers and many works of speculative fiction, Neuromancer is interested in a whole lot more that plot development. Gibson famously coined the word “cyberspace” and he imagines a world where continents are ruled more by corporations and crime syndicates than nations, where cultural trends both ancient and modern dwell side by side, where high-tech and biotech miracles are as ordinary as air. On one page you’ll find a discussion of nerve splicing, on another a description of an open-air market in Istanbul. An African sailor with tribal scars on his face might meet a Japanese corporate drone implanted with microprocessors, the better to measure the mutagen in his bloodstream. When he’s not plumbing the future, Gibson dips into weighty themes such as the nature of love, what drives people toward self-destruction and mind/body dualism. It’s a rich, heady blend.

That complexity translates over to the novel’s prose style, which is why I suspect my first effort to read it failed. Gibson peppers his paragraphs with allusions to Asian geography and Rastafarianism, computer programming and corporate finance. He writes about subjects ranging from drug addiction and zero-gravity physics to synesthesia and brutal back-alley violence. And he writes with next to no exposition. You aren’t told that Case grew up in the Sprawl, which is the nickname for the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a concreted strip of the Eastern Seaboard, and that he began training in Miami to become a cowboy, which is slang for a cyberspace hacker, and that he was immensely skilled at it, et cetera, et cetera. No, you’re thrust right into Case’s shoes as he swills rice beer in Japan and pops amphetamines and tries to con the underworld in killing him when his back is turned because he thinks he’ll never work again. You have to piece together the rest on your own.

Challenging? You bet. But it’s electrifying once you get it.

I’ve worked by paperback copy until the spine and cover have split, until the pages have faded like old newsprint. Echoes of its diction sound in my own writing. Thoughts of Chiba City or BAMA pop into my head when I walk through the mall and hear a mélange of voices speaking in Spanish and English and Creole and German. Neuromancer is in me like a tea bag, flavoring my life, and I can’t imagine what it would be like if I hadn’t pressed on into page 26....less

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James rated it:

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01/11/08

In the era of Blade Runner, Music Video, Cold-War Endgame, and skyrocketing crime rates; in the time of the very beginning of the digital revolution, Neuromancer hit like a ton of bricks. It took both trends and said, "here is what the future could be like." And while it wasn't pretty, it was interesting. It was cool. It was sexy. It even sounded like fun, in a short-lived, stimulant fueled sort of way.

The book's flaws are well documented. Case, the main character, is such an ass t...more

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Keely rated it:

(review of isbn 0441012035)

05/26/07

bookshelves: novel, sci-fi

A lozenge is a shape. Like a cube, or a triangle, or a sphere. I know that every time he types it, you are going to imagine a cough drop flying serenely by, but it's a shape. It's from heraldry for god's sake. You may want to look up some synonyms to insert for yourself, here's a few: diamond, rhombus, mascle.

Now that the greatest obstacle in Gibson's vocabulary has been dealt with, I can tell you that he writes in one of the finest voices of any Science Fiction author. His ability to descr...more

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Dxarmbar06 rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

02/26/08

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: Anyone bored with scifi

I HATE contemporary scifi. I can't stand how everything at BN and Borders under "scifi" is little more than genre fiction, carved down into meaningless bad story telling that's layered with technological fluff and ramblings written at a sixth grade level. And cliche characters! Can't forget the Cliche Characters. I'd just about given up on science fiction....until I picked up Neuromancer.

The name itself called to me, and then I read the first sentance...

"The sky above the ...more

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Monk rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

12/08/07

bookshelves: required_reading, sci-fi

Read in October, 1992

This book is one of the relatively few 5-Star books I can rate. On a scale of 1 to 5, one means stay away from this book. Five is something that changes your life after you read it. Gibson's Neuromancer is a definite five.

Neuromancer is the story of a burned-out hacker named Case. Having performed the one unforgivable crime of his shadowy business - stealing from his employer - he has literally been burned out. A Russian mycotoxin has destroyed his nervous sytem so accutely that he is...more

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Aerin rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

07/01/07

bookshelves: sciencefiction

Read in January, 1998

This book went way over my head when I read it in high school. Either that, or it was just bad. Part of me wants to go back and read it again to find out what I missed. Part of me thinks, it was probably just bad.

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E.B. rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

10/13/08

Read in April, 2008

recommends it for: Cyber Goths, Computer Programers, IT Pros

Wow. What a terrible book.

First, let me just say that I read for entertainment value. Anything else that happens is gravy. That being said- the biggest reason this book is so awful is that Gibson's characters are completely hollow. Gibson makes it up as he goes along. He'll introduce a character, barely describe him and then 10 chapters later toss in another description. As if to say "Oh, yeah did I mention his hands were chainsaws? Yeah, they were totally chainsaws. Cool right?"
...more Wow. What a terrible book.

First, let me just say that I read for entertainment value. Anything else that happens is gravy. That being said- the biggest reason this book is so awful is that Gibson's characters are completely hollow. Gibson makes it up as he goes along. He'll introduce a character, barely describe him and then 10 chapters later toss in another description. As if to say "Oh, yeah did I mention his hands were chainsaws? Yeah, they were totally chainsaws. Cool right?"
The reason this is such a headache is that once your mind's eye has cast the characters, as shallow as they are, all of a sudden there's a new dimension tossed in. He doesn't just do this with characters, he does it with locations as well. Never giving you a chance to really place the characters in a setting. Other than "a dark city street." I mean, Try a little harder Gibson. I'm not a writer, but isn't that a sign of BAD WRITING?

The second reason this book is so bad, is Gibson's writing "style". I hate writing "styles". Stop trying to show off and just tell me a story. The "style" makes Neuromancer a very difficult book to read. I'd read 2 or 3 chapters and literally have no idea what was going on. Gibson will write a whole page with four lines of dialog and the rest of the page will describe absolutely nothing. Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: "Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

Now- for the positives. Gibson clearly just wanted to write a string of action sequences and techno-babel. Being a computer nerd myself, I found all of that interesting. Towards the end the characters actually have dialog with each other and as things come to a head it actually get's entertaining here and there. Another huge plus is that this book is considered the first true Cyberpunk work and has been heavily mined by Hollywood, Anime and pop-culture in general. Coining phrases like Matrix, Cyberspace, etc. For me, this was probably the first book I ever read just to say I read it. I don't regret it, but believe me, I'm glad it's over because I literally forced myself through it. Just wait for the movie. It'll probably make more sense....less

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Martine rated it:

(review of isbn 8585887907)

01/26/08

bookshelves: blokey-books, dystopia, modern-fiction, north-american, postmodern, science-fiction

Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: sci fi fans

I'll confess I had a hard time getting into Neuromancer, the book that started the cyberpunk craze back in the mid-eighties. The first few chapters were so disjointed and deliberately obscure that I wasn't sure what was going on, nor whether I actually cared. Then things gradually started to fall into place. Seventy pages into the story I got the hang of Gibson's style, one hundred pages in I actually began to enjoy it, and now that I've finished it, I actually look forward to reading it ...more I'll confess I had a hard time getting into Neuromancer, the book that started the cyberpunk craze back in the mid-eighties. The first few chapters were so disjointed and deliberately obscure that I wasn't sure what was going on, nor whether I actually cared. Then things gradually started to fall into place. Seventy pages into the story I got the hang of Gibson's style, one hundred pages in I actually began to enjoy it, and now that I've finished it, I actually look forward to reading it again at some point. I'm not sure if that makes Neuromancer a good book, but it's certainly interesting.

As the blurb has it, Neuromancer is about Case, who was the sharpest data thief in the matrix, until an ex-employer crippled his nervous system. Now a new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run against an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a mirror-eyed girl street-samurai riding shotgun, he is sent on an adventure in a futuristic world where the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred and where nothing is quite what it seems, to fight an enemy he doesn't know. On the way to the final showdown, the reader is taken to Japan, America, Turkey and a few imaginary places, gets to meet quite a few bizarre people (if they are even human) and generally wonders what the f*** is going on.

You have to give Gibson credit for the virtual reality world he created over twenty years ago, long before the Internet and virtual reality as we know it were a fact. His futurama is a pretty fantastic and well-realised place, with characters of its own, a vernacular of its own, the works. The reader is thrown headlong into this world and is not given any explanations along the way, which makes the first few chapters hard to get through. After a while, though, you start getting a feel for the patois, and the book becomes much easier to read. However, it still has a few major flaws, which only become more obvious as you continue reading. For one thing, the characters aren't developed nearly as well as the world in which they live. They are interesting, but Gibson doesn't give them an awful lot to do or feel, which is a great shame. The same is true for the story as a whole. While there are plenty of interesting ideas floating in there, somehow they won't gel into a proper story, as Gibson is so busy focusing on the cool world he has created that he forgets to add such basic things as backgrounds, emotions, story arcs and smooth transitions. Even more damagingly, he fails to provide his heroes with a clear quest. While their actions and adventures are quite exciting, it is not clear exactly who or what they're up against or what they're trying to achieve or prevent, which makes it hard to identify with them or root for them. Throw in a rather vague bad guy (or bad guys?) and you have quite a few examples of bad story-telling -- things that any creative writing teacher would warn his students to steer clear of, and which have no business being in a book as famous and acclaimed as this one.

And yet... For all its flaws, Neuromancer IS pretty cool, and I genuinely look forward to re-reading it at some point. I just wish Gibson had made better use of the superb ingredients he's working with. Neuromancer could have been a brilliant book; as it is, it's merely interesting.
...less

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Sandi rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

01/25/08

bookshelves: 2008, sci-fi

Read in January, 2008

For well over 20 years, I have seen copies of William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” on the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves of nearly every bookstore I have gone into. I recently decided to pick up a copy and read it. I figured a book that’s been continuously in print for over twenty years and is considered a ground-breaking work in Science Fiction had to be good. I figured wrong.

“Neuromancer” is a very convoluted novel. It jumps from local to local and situation to situation in a very je...more

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Ian rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

12/13/07

bookshelves: fantasy-sci-fi

Read in January, 2007

I was sorely disappointed by this novel. The book that coined the phrase "cyberspace," this is a groundbreaking novel in its depiction of an interconnected world that preceded the Internet by twenty years. It is full of degenerates and waste-oids, focused on the young and talented Case who spends his days scheming for enough money for his next fix. As fun as that sounds, the author's style occasionally left me confused and wondering just why Case and some other whack-job were strapp...more

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Tia rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

12/01/08

Read in December, 2008

This is not a book to read for the writing or, even, dare I say, substance. This is a book to read for a complete immersion into an underground culture. All of the action occurs in the white space, and the characters are nothing more than stereotypes of computer-obsessed, cyber junkies - very hollow and predictable. The appeal lies in the cyberpunk culture that the story spawned, and, while it's hard to put aside everything you love about reading, there's nothing wrong with enjoying some stra...more

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Brooke rated it:

(review of isbn 0441012035)

11/30/08

bookshelves: 2008

Read in November, 2008

I find myself at a loss to describe how I felt about this book. In some ways, it wasn't really that great - the characters are 2D at best, the first third of the book lacks any explanation or definitions to help acclimate the reader to the new world (for a while I was convinced I was going to read the whole book without having any idea what actually happened), and the whole thing seemed vague (who was doing what and why?).

By the end, though, things cleared up, I felt more comfortable with t...more

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Brian Hodges rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

06/14/08

bookshelves: sci-fi-fantasy

Read in June, 2008

This one was a slog to get through. I decided to give Neuromancer a try after seeing that several friends had rated it highly and that it is apparently the book that launched what would eventually become known as the cyberpunk genre. But as hard as I tried, I had a really hard time getting into it. Most of my disconnect came from a combination of really DENSE plot materials and really VAGUE character motivations. Believe me, I'm no dummy when it comes to following a complex confusing story, ...more This one was a slog to get through. I decided to give Neuromancer a try after seeing that several friends had rated it highly and that it is apparently the book that launched what would eventually become known as the cyberpunk genre. But as hard as I tried, I had a really hard time getting into it. Most of my disconnect came from a combination of really DENSE plot materials and really VAGUE character motivations. Believe me, I'm no dummy when it comes to following a complex confusing story, but even this one had me feeling as though I was constantly missing something... and not in a cool JJ Abrams-esque way. For the first couple of chapters the dark, cryptic and enigmatic storytelling intrigued me and made me exited to keep reading, but after awhile it just got tedious to wade through. The fact that I was never quite certain why a particular action, object or character was important, or dangerous, or necessary made it hard to feel connected to anything that was happening.

The story from a distance IS actually pretty cool and intriguing. In the somewhat distant future where technology rules everything, a "cyber-cowboy" hacker named Case is recruited by a couple of mysterious characters to help orchestrate a run on the network of a large company. Along the way they enlist the help of (amongst others) a guy who can generate holograms and a dead former hacker who only exists now as a sort of personality program. As the story unfolds there is plenty of digital action (it's easy to see where the minds behind THE MATRIX drew their inspiration from), technological intrigue and even a bit of sexy interludes.

In the end though, the denseness of the plot and the vagueness of everyones motivations made it hard to me to care about any of the character's (or even know WHAT exactly they were trying to achieve.) But aside from a few really cool standout scenes, I really couldn't get into this book. I know for cyberpunk and sci-fi devotees, it's probably sacrilege that I didn't like this one, but so it goes....less

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tadpole rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

03/29/08

bookshelves: 1001, 2006, gibson

Read in June, 2006

This book has to have the coolest first line of any book that I have ever read - "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Gibson also invented a word with this novel, that word being "cyberspace". I would think that inventing a buzz word should be on the to-do list of any writer living on the edge, located right between the entries of 1. Perpetrate a literary hoax and 3. Smoke hashish in Morocco while languidly stroking a pet gazelle (lif...more

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Leah rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

03/31/08

Read in March, 2008

I was expecting Neuromancer to be like Pattern Recognition: infinitely subtle and detailed but taking place in a world that's recognizably like our own. But Neuromancer takes place somewhere decidedly different from the here and now and I feel like I'll be dissecting everything that happened in its dense 350-pages for months. Needless to say, this is an amazing, amazing book. Gibson anticipates trends in culture and technology in ways that will make this book seem current for decades to come,...more

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Pwntalive rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

08/23/07

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: Rastafarian Navy

Many cite this as the start of the cyber-punk movement in contemporary fiction. Its gibsons greakout work and the first in his series titles. This one basically sets the pace for the whole mans whole career.

breaks down like this:
Silicon Cowboy burns out at the hands of some nefarious characters. In some downward spiral of self destructive behaviors he get picked up by some shady folks to do some serious burn on some of the slickest cats in the military industrial complex. Like a bush leag...more

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Gramarye rated it:

(review of isbn 0441000681)

04/19/07

bookshelves: literature, sciencefiction

Any number of dubious and desperate individuals dwell in the shady underside of the Tokyo megalopolis, and one of the more desperate of his kind is a burned-out former hacker named Henry Dorsett Case. Case was once a top-notch 'cowboy', a talented hacker who was skilled at using a delicate computer interface to directly connect his brain to the global 'cyberspace' network...but his luck ran out when he attempted to skim a little too much off the top of one of his business dealings. His employers...more Any number of dubious and desperate individuals dwell in the shady underside of the Tokyo megalopolis, and one of the more desperate of his kind is a burned-out former hacker named Henry Dorsett Case. Case was once a top-notch 'cowboy', a talented hacker who was skilled at using a delicate computer interface to directly connect his brain to the global 'cyberspace' network...but his luck ran out when he attempted to skim a little too much off the top of one of his business dealings. His employers retaliated by drugging him with a powerful toxin that fried his nervous system -- leaving him literally burned out, physically incapable of accessing cyberspace. Unable to find a treatment or cure, deprived of the work he enjoys, and increasingly addicted to drugs, Case scrapes together a living as a street dealer and secretly hopes that one of his shady associates will eventually put him out of his misery. Yet when he is approached by a well-dressed man named Armitage and a cybernetically enhanced hired killer named Molly, he receives an offer he'd never thought possible: in exchange for a cure for his damaged nerves, he'll be hired to perform a series of complicated and extremely dangerous hacking jobs with information given only on a need-to-know basis. Case accepts, and is soon back in cyberspace and carrying out the orders he's been given. But Case has been recruited for a purpose that is far more complex than he could have ever imagined, and he soon starts to realise that his efforts are only a small part of a much grander plan that could shake the very foundations of cyberspace as he knows it.

I haven't read any of Gibson's other books before, so my first foray into his world required some adjustment. It strongly reminded me of the first time I tried to read A Clockwork Orange: the slang, speech patterns, and other terms used to tell the story were all but incomprehensible to me at the outset. I had to keep going back and checking to be sure that I hadn't missed something crucial. Gradually, though, as I found myself more at ease with the jargon of hackers and 'street samurai', the story increasingly caught my interest (even if I still found myself baffled at times and not always certain of what exactly was going on).

That said, I can see why William Gibson's Neuromancer won the science-fiction "triple crown" (the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award) after being published in 1984. The book vividly illustrates a dirty, seedy fictional future, far removed from the glittering sterility of many sci-fi worlds, where the right price can buy you everything from a new pancreas and liver to a rewired nervous system to an evening with a 'meat puppet', a prostitute who is renting out her body in the most literal of terms (with the help of a computer programme that can induce a trance-like state). The line between human and machine has blurred to such an extent that there is actually a need for an intergovernmental and autonomous organization to keep tabs on machines that have artificial intelligence, just to keep them from becoming too powerful. I really began to get into the story when I started to look at Gibson's characters and consider their various and often fascinating degrees of 'inhumanity', whether physical, emotional, psychological, or moral. It's particularly interesting to read Neuromancer and see where Gibson's ideas have shown up in other things I've seen or read -- the anime series Ghost in the Shell and Bubblegum Crisis, to start. The book is definitely a sci-fi classic, and I do hope that I haven't betrayed my near-complete ignorance of the genre in this review. ^^;;...less

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Scott rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

01/23/08

Read in August, 1997

This book pretty much ended any chance of a normal social life for me in high school. After this it was pretty much all about spending after school time learning Linux/Unix, researching ninjitsu, reading about (but not taking) psychedelic drugs, UFOs, Mayan calendar, Detroit techno, bad Belgian industrial dance bands, Survival Research Labs, Fox's 'Millenium', DJ Spooky, really bad clothes and haircut, katakana, obscure B vitamin pills, Mondo 3000, Phrack, 2600, urban warfare, libertarianism, e...more

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Kris rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

06/18/08

One of the best sci-fi books on the face of the earth. I re-read it recently after many years, and every scene makes me wonder why this hasn't been made into a movie. (I probably know why; two words: Johnny Mnemonic.) Probably not as poignant as it was in 1984 considering half of the fi has become sci in the last 24 years. Gibson was amazingly prophetic... even more so considering he knew practically nothing about computers at the time. Yet he coined the term "cyberspace" and basically...more

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Camille rated it:

(review of isbn 0441569595)

10/07/08

Read in October, 2008

Actually, I only read the first 100 pages of this book before deciding it just wasn't worth it. It describes a culture so steeped in drug use and cosmetic surgery using language that is nearly incomprehensible because of the made-up slang that I could not get into it. If I don't care what happens in a story after reading 100 pages, I quit reading.

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Neuromancer (Ace Science Fiction)

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