A review by hirvimaki
Neuromancer by William Gibson

4.0

Like cyberpunk? Gibson coined the term cyberspace (in his novelette "Burning Chrome") and it was through its use in Neuromancer that it gained recognition to become the de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 90s. And we wouldn't have ever seen Neo take that little red pill if it were not for Neuromancer. Reading Neuromancer to understand cyberpunk is like reading Lovecraft to understand horror; you realise how many seeds were planted in this early work that we now take for granted. And although Gibson's vision of future technology was imperfect - no cellphones! - he got a lot of things right, almost eerily so. In fact, author Jack Womack (in the afterword to the 2000 re-issue) suggests that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet, particularly the WWW, developed asking, "[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?".