A review by thurminator
Neuromancer by William Gibson

4.0

This book was one of the most interesting things I've ever read. I have never encountered a book or media experience which seemed to have single-handedly coined half of my interests and hobbies as this one did. Phrases, music, atmosphere, technology. Gibson's writing is absolutely non-stop frenzy and I could only usually loosely understand what was going on at any given moment - this is the science fiction in which you are dropped into a world without any knowledge of what is going on expressed to the fullest. This book is a gritty, unpleasant, underground, dystopian, cyberpunk mess that may have just predicted the future quite well. I might not have had more than a foggy understanding of what is going on at any given moment plot-wise, but I can say that I always "felt" every scene viscerally. It's the only book I've read where the idea of "show, don't tell" is taken to an extreme by telling so much that it somehow is only showing. Reading the afterword by Jack Womack helped me to see some of the feelings the book gave me expressed in words. Several passages stood out to me as knocking on some door in my mind of what I conceive when I try to put my finger on what I love so much about computers:

"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … 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 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."

This taps into some fascination I have with old technology, where the explosion of the internet was still exciting and fresh, when command lines were still used, when a whole encyclopedia could fit on just 50 floppy discs, when I thought that a whole world existed inside my game consoles that I just couldn't see.