Neuromancer is a rare book — bewildering, beautiful, horrifying, disorienting. It’s the story of Case, a ruined hacker who is approached by a woman with a job offer. In the recent past, he made the mistake of stealing from the people he was meant to be stealing for, and as a penalty they destroyed his ability to jack into cyberspace, the realm in which he and everyone lives and moves and has their being: he’s stuck in meatspace, without the ability to work, and far worse….derpived of the stimulation, the rush, he gets from jacking in. But this woman’s boss says he can give that back to Case — for a job.The job begins as a simple case of theft, but grows into an adventure with the highest of stakes.

Without dipping too much into the plot, there are strings upon strings being pulled for the benefit of an artificial intelligence, which a megacorporation has created. Although this is a world where light and flesh, machine and bone, mind and code intermingle in ways both horrifying and mesmerizing (like the flash of an atom bomb, brilliant but broadcasting death), there are still some rules. You can have robotic organs, lab-grown muscles, customized faces, even experience the world through your girlfriend’s eyes– but artificial intelligence is right out. It seems AI is one demon that this world doesn’t want to let out of the bottle, one gollum it intends to keep dismantled.

What makes Neuromancer such an interesting read, though, is less its story and more its world and the way it’s presented to the reader. Cyberspace and the virtual are always present — in every line, every page. As with The Shockwave Rider, I’m both at a loss as to how Gibson managed to imagine the digital world so readily, especially when his knowledge of computers was fairly minimal: I read recently in Astounding that when Gibson brought a computer back to a shop complaining of nose, he was informed that it was merely the device’s fan. Gibson was surprised that a computer would need something so pedestrian. I’m also envious of people who read this book before the 1990s jacked us all in. The interlace between the real and the virtual allows for frequent and dramatic scene switches: Case might be talking to one set of people in meatspace, an entirely new set when he’s jacked in, and it’s so easy to toggle in and out that the reader is in for a wild ride. The writing itself is marvelously immersive, somehow making the reader experience the overstimulation and mixed ugliness and beauty of this world. It’s bewildering, confusing, but a wild ride the reader doesn’t quite want to get off of.

Definitely reading more Gibson!

Quotes:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.’

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your Al’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the Al makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts
those ——, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electro-magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things
possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?

The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction.