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Neuromancer (Sprawl #1)

William Gibson

Why we're reading this: Hugo Winner 1985
Nebula Award 1984
#14 on NPR's Top 100 SF/F novels of all time (2011 poll) http://www.npr.…more
[close] Hugo Winner 1985
Nebula Award 1984
#14 on NPR's Top 100 SF/F novels of all time (2011 poll) http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/1390858...
#8 on Locus Magazines Best SciFi novels of the 20th century http://www.locusmag.com/2012/AllCentu...

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Mar 14, 2013 Robin rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2016

I won't go into a synopsis of the book, as many people have already summarized it, and much better than I ever could. For those of you who are not aware, Neuromancer won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K Dick award, the first book to have ever achieved all three honors. Gibson was responsible for coining the term cyberspace in another short story, and here, his protagonist, Case, jacks into the matrix. Yes, this book influenced the Wachowski's film, The Matrix.

Keep in mind that this book was I won't go into a synopsis of the book, as many people have already summarized it, and much better than I ever could. For those of you who are not aware, Neuromancer won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K Dick award, the first book to have ever achieved all three honors. Gibson was responsible for coining the term cyberspace in another short story, and here, his protagonist, Case, jacks into the matrix. Yes, this book influenced the Wachowski's film, The Matrix.

Keep in mind that this book was written in 1983. For those of you who do not recall technology in 1983, there wasn't much available for the general population. The internet (or matrix, if you will) was first developed in the late 1960s but wasn't expanded upon until the early 1980s when the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced. Its usage was mainly limited to research and educational organizations at that time. It wasn't until 1989 that the first commercial dial-up service was introduced in the US. Personal computers were first introduced in 1977, and were becoming more popular in the early 1980s, but it wasn't until the 1990s that Microsoft and Apple developed the operating systems that were to make computers common in many households. I took my first computer class in college in 1983. I was just at the time when programming was switching from input via punch cards to actually typing in code via a terminal. The terminal was attached to a large mainframe computer located at a central location on campus.

Reading the book today gives one a different appreciation than it would have when the book was first released. It is amazing to me now because, in a sense, Gibson gave us a little peek into the future. From an early 1980s standpoint, this was an entirely different type of book. Cyberpunk was born - a combination of the cyberspace of the internet and the punk movement which had come into being in the late 1970s.

So...from that standpoint the book was fantastic to me. On the other hand, I was confused for the first part of the book. It was difficult for me to understand what was going on. Interestingly, I was reading about the "singularity" the other day, and the article's author thought that perhaps when AI becomes sentient, humans will not understand, as the AI will be capable of unlimited intelligence. Maybe Gibson understood this and deliberately made the beginnings of the book confusing. I really could not identify with the two major characters, Case and Molly. I could find no common ground with them, so it was difficult for me actually to care what happened to them throughout the book. I've never been a big fan of cyberpunk and given a choice I would read soft sci-fi instead of hard, so I was probably a little predisposed not to like the book based on my particular reading preferences. As far as the plotting, aside from the confused feeling at the beginning, I felt that it did move along fairly well. I won't give away any spoilers, but I did like the ambiguity of the ending.

I used Amazon whisper sync partially to listen to, but mainly to read, Neuromancer. I would NOT recommend the narrator, Robertson Dean. I had tried several times to start listening to the book but never got very far. His voice was flat with little inflection, and the way he read the female characters really bugged me.

From a standpoint of what Neuromancer gave to science fiction, I think the book deserves five stars. However, in my opinion, reading the book just for my pleasure, I would give it three stars. Hence, a 4-star rating.
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Dec 31, 2011 Ken McDouall rated it it was amazing

This is the seminal 1980s novel that essentially created the concept of cyberspace, as well as the sub-genre of science fiction cyberpunk--a label that Gibson disavows. Technological reality is quickly catching up to Gibson's dystopian vision. Gibson here has created a gritty criminal underground that survives on black market transactions on the fringe of a corporate-controlled society dominated by artificial intelligence systems. High-adrenaline, page-turning thriller with a dark and threatenin ...more

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