Neuromancer (Mass Market Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price.... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Neuromancer is a fitting commemoration of the tenth anniversary of publication of Gibson's Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel. The text is abridged, read by the author, and enhanced with music, sound effects, and other audio engineering. The plot contains sex, drugs, black market body parts, virtual reality, electronic relationships, pleasure palaces, murder, mayhem, cloned assassins, and intrigue in cyberspace, with nary a virtual nice guy in the mix. Wow! There's just enough time to take a deep breath between cassettes, as the listener is bombarded with strong language, tumultuous violence, and compelling imagery. Terrific stuff. Gibson's horrifying vision of our terrible headlong rush to nowhere is a must for science fiction and adult fiction collections.
Cliff Glaviano, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ace (July 1, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441569595
• ISBN-13: 978-0441569595
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (474 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #8,250 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Simply Put: Great Science Fiction, November 19, 2002

By	Travis J Smith (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews

'Neuromancer' is one of a handful of books/movies that I would pick to represent the science-fiction genre. Gibson succeeds on all levels here - I enjoyed the story, the characters, the settings, the technology, everything. Gibson writes about imperfection - he doesn't gloss anything over or try to make it too pretty. The characters are flawed, and have weaknesses - just like in real life. They live in a gritty world - just like in real life. And around them all, is technology - just like in real life.

'Neuromancer' is the story of Case: a hacker-type, cyberpunk, whatever you want to call him. He makes hackers of today look like amateurs - he totally immerses himself into the machine. Washed-up and raked over the coals, he gets a chance at a come back, even if it isn't on the most pleasant of terms.

Read this book if you are a science fiction fan - if for no other reason than to see what all the hype is about. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Past Page 25 ..., January 30, 2008

By	Loren Eaton - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Neuromancer (Hardcover)

Adapted from ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com

The first time I tried to read Neuromancer, I stopped around page 25.

I was about 15 years old and I'd heard it was a classic, a must-read from 1984. So I picked it up and I plowed through the first chapter, scratching my head the whole time. Then I shoved it onto my bookshelf, where it was quickly forgotten. It was a dense, multilayered read, requiring more effort than a hormone-addled adolescent wanted to give. But few years later, I pulled the book down and gave it another chance. This time, William Gibson's dystopic rabbit hole swallowed me whole.

Neuromancer is basically a futuristic crime caper. The main character is Case, a burnt-out hacker, a cyberthief. When the book opens, a disgruntled employer has irrevocably destroyed parts of his nervous system with a mycotoxin, meaning he can't jack into the matrix, an abstract representation of earth's computer network. Then he receives a suspiciously sweet offer: A mysterious employer will fix him up if he'll sign on for a special job. He cautiously agrees and finds himself joined by a schizophrenic ex-Special Forces colonel; a perverse performance artist who wrecks havoc with his holographic imaginings; a long-dead mentor whose personality has been encoded as a ROM construct; and a nubile mercenary with silver lenses implanted over her eyes, retractable razors beneath her fingernails and one heckuva chip on her shoulder. Case soon learns that the target he's supposed to crack and his employer and are one and the same -- an artificial intelligence named Wintermute.

Unlike most crime thrillers and many works of speculative fiction, Neuromancer is interested in a whole lot more that plot development. Gibson famously coined the word "cyberspace" and he imagines a world where continents are ruled more by corporations and crime syndicates than nations, where cultural trends both ancient and modern dwell side by side, where high-tech and biotech miracles are as ordinary as air. On one page you'll find a discussion of nerve splicing, on another a description of an open-air market in Istanbul. An African sailor with tribal scars on his face might meet a Japanese corporate drone implanted with microprocessors, the better to measure the mutagen in his bloodstream. When he's not plumbing the future, Gibson dips into weighty themes such as the nature of love, what drives people toward self-destruction and mind/body dualism. It's a rich, heady blend.

That complexity translates over to the novel's prose style, which is why I suspect my first effort to read it failed. Gibson peppers his paragraphs with allusions to Asian geography and Rastafarianism, computer programming and corporate finance. He writes about subjects ranging from drug addiction and zero-gravity physics to synesthesia and brutal back-alley violence. And he writes with next to no exposition. You aren't told that Case grew up in the Sprawl, which is the nickname for the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a concreted strip of the Eastern Seaboard, and that he began training in Miami to become a cowboy, which is slang for a cyberspace hacker, and that he was immensely skilled at it, et cetera, et cetera. No, you're thrust right into Case's shoes as he swills rice beer in Japan and pops amphetamines and tries to con the underworld in killing him when his back is turned because he thinks he'll never work again. You have to piece together the rest on your own.

Challenging? You bet. But it's electrifying once you get it.

I've worked by paperback copy until the spine and cover have split, until the pages have faded like old newsprint. Echoes of its diction sound in my own writing. Thoughts of Chiba City or BAMA pop into my head when I walk through the mall and hear a mélange of voices speaking in Spanish and English and Creole and German. Neuromancer is in me like a tea bag, flavoring my life, and I can't imagine what it would be like if I hadn't pressed on into page 26.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Neuromancer invented its own genre., December 2, 1999

By	Adam Scoville (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Neuromancer is the epitome and the antecedent of all cyberpunk fiction. In fact, with this book Gibson, seemingly quite accidentally, actually coined the term "cyberspace" (not to mention providing the original "matrix"). The characters are vivid and interesting, and the world that they inhabit is just as colorful, in its urbanized, futuristic way. Neuromancer is relatively brief, laudably free of some science fiction writers' tendency to expound verbosely on their philosophy of the future. Even so, Gibson's vision comes out in the writing, perhaps even more effectively. You will finish this book quickly. When you do, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are just as well paced, continue in the same vein without becoming philosophical, and are refreshingly self-contained for science fiction sequels.