A review by darthsid
Neuromancer by William Gibson

4.0

Where to begin? Neuromancer took me on a rather remarkable journey, the likes of which I've never experienced before, in sci-fi or otherwise. The worldbuilding is quite spectacular, with unmatched evocative metaphors giving descriptive life to both real and cyber space. I mean, where else would you expect to see something like this as the opening line in a book?

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

Personally I found the narrative flow a tad weaker though. It might be just me, but I didn't find the elusive quality of a tale that grips my attention and makes me unable to put the book down — on the contrary, I did pause and continue the next day for about a week while reading Neuromancer. That said, there were segments of action and pulsing flow that made me get up and pace the room, strongly resisting the urge to flip pages to find out what happens next.

The characters — or at least the main ones — are realistic and well fleshed-out. Neuromancer's characters are imperfect and human. You navigate the tale through the lens of Henry Case, and the brilliantly descriptive writing makes it natural to be able to fall into his mind and experience the world as he does, with all his highs and lows.

All in all, an excellent novel and quite possibly a must-read for sci-fi fans. So much of the cyberpunk genre has directly evolved from this book. I was surprised to discover that Neuromancer (and a previous book by Gibson, Burning Chrome) was the origin of the term "cyberspace", a word I encounter frequently in my day-to-day work in software today.

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."