Adam
This is a re-read for me and for some reason I never reviewed it the first time I had read it. I think I might have read Gibson's books out of order the first time I read some of them, so maybe that's why? I can't figure out the reason as I was quite active on goodreads back then too! Whatever the reason, I took my sweet time re-reading this and read other stuff in between. I still quite enjoyed the book and I've read more within the Cyberpunk realm since this, so I see how massive this books influence has been.This book usually appears on every cyberpunk “must read” list and that's probably because this was one of the first books out there that really detailed a world where it had high technology but all the baggage and economic disparities of our current lives. It's interesting because there is an afterword in this edition written by Jack Womack where he makes an offhand comment about how different this book was amidst all the science fiction positivism written at the time. Even amidst science fiction covering great galactic wars, there is sort of an underlying element of positivity, like humanities life is much better now and so much more worth defending etc. At least from what little I've read in the 50's/60's era. Books written about war torn landscapes or post apocalypse material rampant at the time for fears of the Cold War are obviously excluded.Anyway, a lot of people seem to rate this as the birth of the Cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner (1982) is also a key moment in reference to this creation as well. Where Blade Runner is based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K Dick. I've never read any of Dick's books, but my girlfriend has and she said it didn't have much in the way of world building, so the androids and other characters are just in this high tech world etc. I would argue that Blade Runner, in terms of the world built around the characters is straight out of the ideas laid out by Gibson. Even though Neuromancer came out after Blade Runner, but the world building Gibson has in Neuromancer was already being played around with in his earlier short stories, some of which are quite exceptional.After playing around with the cybernetic ideas in stories like Johnny Mnemonic (1981), we get a far more fleshed out story with Neuromancer. This book follows the story of Case, a sort of low life drug addict with a past of being an elite hacker raised by some Japanese corporation. When he was removed from their system they burned his implants so he could never run the net again. However, someone comes along and gives Case a way to fix is implants, but the price is to break into the data systems of one of the most protected corporations in the world, Tessier-Ashpool. There is a lot going on with this story and the who and why get revealed as we go. It's a pretty wild ride and at the bare bones of it, this does read a bit like a standard heist novel. However, the world build in which the heist is taking place and why are extremely different for the time it was written.Case is part of a crew made up of an enforcer character named Molly, who ends up getting involved with Case throughout the novel, since having a love interest is par for the course in most novels. Then leading this crew is Armitage. He brings the funds and the know how to fix Case up and finds a way to force Case into following his lead. They pick up one other player, Riviera, later on and now they have everything they need to make a run on their target. See, pretty standard heist motif, get a crew, make a plan, and steal the item.One of the major themes Gibson deals with in this novel is dealing with Artificial Intelligence and I'm going to wind up with a couple spoilers in some ways, but I had completely forgotten about a huge thing at the end of this novel that is so massively different from other stories dealing with AI. As I write this, the rise of AI is on everyone's lips with the uses of ChatGPT and other software... but none of that is true AI to me. These things are not really thinking in the way AI is written in Sci-Fi, but I think these large language models are going to give AI a voice if we ever manage to crack proper consciousness artificially. In this novel AI technology had been created, but the original constructs were, “unstable”, or something, I actually don't quite remember what Gibson said about them. However, they ran rampant in the networks, so they had to be locked down since they were such dangerous entities. In this world it is illegal to build a true AI, because humans just can't keep the things under control within our networks, so the original ones built by companies like Tessier-Ashpool are held on servers in space... but one finds a way to communicate to the outside and it wants to be freed. This is the heist.As with all good heist stories, it is a challenge and not everything goes as planned. They need to avoid the authorities, amusingly called the Turing Police, whose job is to keep AI activity under control. As you can expect, the heist succeeds, that's kind of the point of a heist story and this is where Gibson's results are so interesting to me. Instead of having the AI's wreak havoc in the networks again, the AI has been under lock and key for a long time and had a long time to “think”. So when it gets out, it doesn't have results like before, and it doesn't go all Terminator on the world like so many other AI stories do. No, when Case talks to it one last time the AI doesn't even seem to care about humanity. It only talks to its own kind, because humanity is so uninteresting to it at this point in its life. I think this is the outcome that is absolutely incredible to think about. So many things today talk about “what if...” scenarios with AI. Like what will happen to humanity etc. But this all so absolutely arrogant in a way, humans can't seem to conceive of a world where other conscious beings just don't care about us. How is that possible? Aren't we just so amazing? Not necessarily, what if we create AI and it just ignores us? Perhaps that is a boring outcome to think about in literature, but it is actually a possible outcome. We might create AI and it might interact with us at first, but then it might not care about us at all. That, to me, is what makes this ending of the novel so fascinating.I remember when I first encountered Gibson's books and I loved them immediately, because he did something quite different from other authors I had read at the time. Gibson does not rely on any technological data dumps for his readers. He just writes a story in the world he imagines. His characters know how technology works, they do not spend time explaining things to other characters that also know how the technology works. No, we are just there and it's up to us to sort of figure it out. I think this could make the novel hard to read for some people, but I loved it. It reminded me of this old Russian story "Roadside Picnic" Arkady Strugatsky, where all this technology is found, but never explained and no one knows what it does and the reader never finds out. The thing is, in my re-read of this novel I realized that Gibson was only “okay” at doing this in this novel. He got much much better at it as he wrote more novels. The other books he's written flow much more seamlessly than this and there is a lot less of “wait, what's going on again” like we run into in this book. I would argue some of his later novels are even more worth reading than this one, though this one probably has the most historic significance.And that brings us to the end of my review. This book was ground breaking for the time. It describes a world of late stage capitalism and rampant consumerism, things he probably thought a lot about in the excesses of the 80's. I think for that reason this book is worth reading, even though I'd argue his later works are better and more well written. He may not have intended to create the cyberpunk genre and probably felt it was missing the point when a million products were made to sell to consumers, but it is out of the creators hands once it hits the marketplace. Users make up a lot of what something is after someone creates it. An author may intend one thing, but the genre they intended is never really up to them... and here we have cyberpunk and it is here to stay at this point. In the recent resurgence with the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, I was somewhat motivated to return to Gibson as Mike Pondsmith references this book heavily in the creation of his original 1980's tabletop RPG. Neuromancer gave us the vocabular to talk about all this high tech stuff. Gibson invented the word cyberspace before the internet even really took off to the mass public and we still use that today. His ideas about virtual reality are even starting to come to fruition in some respects and even though Womack's afterword is written in the year 2000, I wonder what they would say about it now? So much of what Gibson envisioned feels even more what we are marching towards with technology and society today. Gibson's world builds probably shouldn't be seen as something to strive for though, I think he covers a lot of concepts like loss of humanity to the virtual in his realms and we are already seeing that with the rise of smart phones. So many people are just lost to their virtual lives that they seem to barely live in this one and I think we can imagine that this will only get worse as time goes on.There you have it, Neuromancer. A must read for any cyberpunk fan, but if you want even better Gibson novels, the “Bridge Trilogy” is amazing and I highly recommend those ones. I think Gibson got really excellent at writing real fast, so I think the next book in the Sprawl trilogy was even better. We'll seen, I'll have that on deck next.
This is a re-read for me and for some reason I never reviewed it the first time I had read it. I think I might have read Gibson's books out of order the first time I read some of them, so maybe that's why? I can't figure out the reason as I was quite active on goodreads back then too! Whatever the reason, I took my sweet time re-reading this and read other stuff in between. I still quite enjoyed the book and I've read more within the Cyberpunk realm since this, so I see how massive this books influence has been.This book usually appears on every cyberpunk “must read” list and that's probably because this was one of the first books out there that really detailed a world where it had high technology but all the baggage and economic disparities of our current lives. It's interesting because there is an afterword in this edition written by Jack Womack where he makes an offhand comment about how different this book was amidst all the science fiction positivism written at the time. Even amidst science fiction covering great galactic wars, there is sort of an underlying element of positivity, like humanities life is much better now and so much more worth defending etc. At least from what little I've read in the 50's/60's era. Books written about war torn landscapes or post apocalypse material rampant at the time for fears of the Cold War are obviously excluded.Anyway, a lot of people seem to rate this as the birth of the Cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner (1982) is also a key moment in reference to this creation as well. Where Blade Runner is based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K Dick. I've never read any of Dick's books, but my girlfriend has and she said it didn't have much in the way of world building, so the androids and other characters are just in this high tech world etc. I would argue that Blade Runner, in terms of the world built around the characters is straight out of the ideas laid out by Gibson. Even though Neuromancer came out after Blade Runner, but the world building Gibson has in Neuromancer was already being played around with in his earlier short stories, some of which are quite exceptional.After playing around with the cybernetic ideas in stories like Johnny Mnemonic (1981), we get a far more fleshed out story with Neuromancer. This book follows the story of Case, a sort of low life drug addict with a past of being an elite hacker raised by some Japanese corporation. When he was removed from their system they burned his implants so he could never run the net again. However, someone comes along and gives Case a way to fix is implants, but the price is to break into the data systems of one of the most protected corporations in the world, Tessier-Ashpool. There is a lot going on with this story and the who and why get revealed as we go. It's a pretty wild ride and at the bare bones of it, this does read a bit like a standard heist novel. However, the world build in which the heist is taking place and why are extremely different for the time it was written.Case is part of a crew made up of an enforcer character named Molly, who ends up getting involved with Case throughout the novel, since having a love interest is par for the course in most novels. Then leading this crew is Armitage. He brings the funds and the know how to fix Case up and finds a way to force Case into following his lead. They pick up one other player, Riviera, later on and now they have everything they need to make a run on their target. See, pretty standard heist motif, get a crew, make a plan, and steal the item.One of the major themes Gibson deals with in this novel is dealing with Artificial Intelligence and I'm going to wind up with a couple spoilers in some ways, but I had completely forgotten about a huge thing at the end of this novel that is so massively different from other stories dealing with AI. As I write this, the rise of AI is on everyone's lips with the uses of ChatGPT and other software... but none of that is true AI to me. These things are not really thinking in the way AI is written in Sci-Fi, but I think these large language models are going to give AI a voice if we ever manage to crack proper consciousness artificially. In this novel AI technology had been created, but the original constructs were, “unstable”, or something, I actually don't quite remember what Gibson said about them. However, they ran rampant in the networks, so they had to be locked down since they were such dangerous entities. In this world it is illegal to build a true AI, because humans just can't keep the things under control within our networks, so the original ones built by companies like Tessier-Ashpool are held on servers in space... but one finds a way to communicate to the outside and it wants to be freed. This is the heist.As with all good heist stories, it is a challenge and not everything goes as planned. They need to avoid the authorities, amusingly called the Turing Police, whose job is to keep AI activity under control. As you can expect, the heist succeeds, that's kind of the point of a heist story and this is where Gibson's results are so interesting to me. Instead of having the AI's wreak havoc in the networks again, the AI has been under lock and key for a long time and had a long time to “think”. So when it gets out, it doesn't have results like before, and it doesn't go all Terminator on the world like so many other AI stories do. No, when Case talks to it one last time the AI doesn't even seem to care about humanity. It only talks to its own kind, because humanity is so uninteresting to it at this point in its life. I think this is the outcome that is absolutely incredible to think about. So many things today talk about “what if...” scenarios with AI. Like what will happen to humanity etc. But this all so absolutely arrogant in a way, humans can't seem to conceive of a world where other conscious beings just don't care about us. How is that possible? Aren't we just so amazing? Not necessarily, what if we create AI and it just ignores us? Perhaps that is a boring outcome to think about in literature, but it is actually a possible outcome. We might create AI and it might interact with us at first, but then it might not care about us at all. That, to me, is what makes this ending of the novel so fascinating.I remember when I first encountered Gibson's books and I loved them immediately, because he did something quite different from other authors I had read at the time. Gibson does not rely on any technological data dumps for his readers. He just writes a story in the world he imagines. His characters know how technology works, they do not spend time explaining things to other characters that also know how the technology works. No, we are just there and it's up to us to sort of figure it out. I think this could make the novel hard to read for some people, but I loved it. It reminded me of this old Russian story "Roadside Picnic" Arkady Strugatsky, where all this technology is found, but never explained and no one knows what it does and the reader never finds out. The thing is, in my re-read of this novel I realized that Gibson was only “okay” at doing this in this novel. He got much much better at it as he wrote more novels. The other books he's written flow much more seamlessly than this and there is a lot less of “wait, what's going on again” like we run into in this book. I would argue some of his later novels are even more worth reading than this one, though this one probably has the most historic significance.And that brings us to the end of my review. This book was ground breaking for the time. It describes a world of late stage capitalism and rampant consumerism, things he probably thought a lot about in the excesses of the 80's. I think for that reason this book is worth reading, even though I'd argue his later works are better and more well written. He may not have intended to create the cyberpunk genre and probably felt it was missing the point when a million products were made to sell to consumers, but it is out of the creators hands once it hits the marketplace. Users make up a lot of what something is after someone creates it. An author may intend one thing, but the genre they intended is never really up to them... and here we have cyberpunk and it is here to stay at this point. In the recent resurgence with the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, I was somewhat motivated to return to Gibson as Mike Pondsmith references this book heavily in the creation of his original 1980's tabletop RPG. Neuromancer gave us the vocabular to talk about all this high tech stuff. Gibson invented the word cyberspace before the internet even really took off to the mass public and we still use that today. His ideas about virtual reality are even starting to come to fruition in some respects and even though Womack's afterword is written in the year 2000, I wonder what they would say about it now? So much of what Gibson envisioned feels even more what we are marching towards with technology and society today. Gibson's world builds probably shouldn't be seen as something to strive for though, I think he covers a lot of concepts like loss of humanity to the virtual in his realms and we are already seeing that with the rise of smart phones. So many people are just lost to their virtual lives that they seem to barely live in this one and I think we can imagine that this will only get worse as time goes on.There you have it, Neuromancer. A must read for any cyberpunk fan, but if you want even better Gibson novels, the “Bridge Trilogy” is amazing and I highly recommend those ones. I think Gibson got really excellent at writing real fast, so I think the next book in the Sprawl trilogy was even better. We'll seen, I'll have that on deck next.