The verdict
Still the founding document of cyberpunk, and still better than most of what it inspired.
Quick facts
- First published
- 1984
- Publisher
- Ace Books
- Series
- Sprawl trilogy, book one
- Awards
- Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards. The only novel to have won all three
- Best for
- Readers who want the source rather than a summary, and do not mind working for it
- Skip it if
- You want the world explained before you are dropped into it
Author William Gibson
Neuromancer is William Gibson’s first novel, published in 1984, and the book that gave the world the word cyberspace. Case was a console cowboy, one of the best, until his employer burned his nervous system as punishment for stealing. Now he cannot jack in at all. A woman called Molly offers him a fix, and the price is a job for a man who will not explain himself. What follows is a heist, and underneath it a story about two halves of an artificial intelligence trying to become one thing.
The idea behind it
The novel runs on a simple, brutal idea: in this future your body is a cost of doing business and your access to the network is your livelihood. Case is not a hero and does not pretend to be. He is a contractor. When his ability to work is destroyed he becomes worth nothing, and the only way back is to make himself useful to someone more powerful than he is.
Around that, Gibson builds a world held by corporations rather than governments, where the wealthy live in orbit and everyone else scrambles below. It is a 1980s fear of deregulation wearing a leather jacket, and it has aged better than most predictions from the period did.
The story, spoiler-light
Case is recruited to run a break-in, not into a building but into a defended space inside the network. Molly, augmented and lethal and the most competent person in the book, works the physical side. Their employer, Armitage, is paying well and answering nothing, which is reason enough to look into him.
Two things are worth knowing before you start. The first is that Gibson does not explain his world. Terms arrive without definitions and you work them out from context, which is a feature and occasionally frustrating. The second is that the plot resolves around an idea rather than a fight, and the final chapters are about what the job was actually for.
What makes it science fiction
Gibson wrote the novel with only a passing knowledge of computing, and that turned out to be an advantage. Cyberspace here is not a description of a network but an image of one: a consensual hallucination, a place with geometry and weather that people enter through a socket behind the ear. It reads as a metaphor rather than a forecast, which is why it still works.
What he did get right was vocabulary. Cyberspace, jacking in, the matrix, flatlining, and ice, his name for the defences around corporate data. Almost every hacker story since has borrowed from that list, usually without improving on it.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
Read it if you want the source. Neuromancer is where a great deal of modern science fiction and film gets its look, and reading it is the difference between recognising a reference and understanding it. It also rewards a second pass, because the plot is denser than it first appears.
Give it a miss, for now, if you want everything explained. Gibson drops you into the deep end and never apologises, and readers who need a clear map of the world in chapter one tend to bounce off it. Snow Crash is the friendlier entry point to the same territory.
Where to start, and what to read next
Start here, at the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. It stands alone, so there is no preparation required, and the two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, follow it in that order. Gibson wrote the last line to prevent himself writing a sequel, then wrote two anyway, and both are worth your time.
If you finish it and want more of the same decade, Snow Crash takes cyberpunk somewhere louder and funnier, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? covers the same questions about bodies and machines from a very different angle.
The verdict
Still the founding document of cyberpunk, and still better than most of what it inspired. It is short, it is dense, and it does not care whether you keep up. Read it for the language and stay for the ending.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to read the Sprawl trilogy in order?
No, but you should. Neuromancer stands alone and was written as a self-contained novel, while Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive both build on what it establishes.
Did Neuromancer win any awards?
Yes, and a unique set of them. It won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick award, and it remains the only novel to have won all three.
Where did the word cyberspace come from?
Gibson coined it in a short story called Burning Chrome, published in 1982, and Neuromancer is what made it stick. He has been clear that he was not describing real networks, because he did not know much about them.
Is Neuromancer hard to read?
The prose is fast and the world is never explained, so the first fifty pages take work. The plot itself is a heist and easy enough to follow once the vocabulary settles. Gibson rewrote the opening two thirds a dozen times to keep it comprehensible, and it shows.
Where can I buy it?
It is available in paperback and as a Kindle edition, and the buy links for Amazon.com and Amazon.in are on this page.