Neuromancer

William Gibson

1/11/2004

Case was a cyber cowboy until he tried to steal from his employers. Now he is burned out and living in the underground in Japan. He is high all the time and is trying to committ suicide through violence. He'll run any scam he can, and not worry about the danger. His time is almost up.

Then he is approached by Armitage, a strange, self contained man. Armitage offers to repair his neural system so he can be a cowboy again. This time he won't be hacking into corporate systems trying to infect or steal from them. Case doesn't know the target, other than it's big and may involve cracking into artificial intelligence.

Molly is assigned to Case. She is the muscle for the team. She has enhancements to her body - implanted glasses, retractable blades under her fingernails, and others Case can only guess. She and Case become closer as his system is returned to better than it was. Then they join Armitage in a scheme that is kept a secret from all of them. As they fulfill assignments, working toward an ultimate goal, Case tries to find out who is hiring them.

Cyberpunk. Neuromancer is one of the first novels that introduced this form of the science fiction genre in the 1980's. It is fantastic (in the idea or vision sense), incomplete, and yet complete at the same time. Gibson's imagination leads the reader through incomprehensible scenes that are beyond what our lives are right now. He took a giant mental leap into a skewed future for Earth. And he makes it work in Neuromancer.

If you like a book that flows fairly logically from beginning to end, Neuromancer is not a book for you. The reality portrayed jumps in and out of the "real world" and the virtual reality and cyber worlds in the novel. Gibson has a lot of technobabble that ties to itself but remained beyond my grasp throughout the story. This is a book to challenge your mind and imagination. It's fascinating.

You can find more about this book at . It is also available in audio or e-book format.

Notice: Sexual situations