Neuromancer (1984) (edit title/settings)

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Summary edit see section history

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Characters edit see section history

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• Henry Dorsett Case: Burned out hacker working as a smuggler and drug dealer in Chiba, Japan. 24 years old.
• Molly Millions: A cybernetically enhanced bodyguard and mercenary for hire.
• The Finn: A technology expert and fence who is friends with Molly.
• Armitage: A military-like man who hires Molly and Case.
• Wintermute: The mysterious person behind Armitage's work.
• Maelcum: Captain of the Marcus Garvey, a tug-ship from Zion, chosen to help Case with his job.
• Ratz: A bartender at Chatsubo. He has a prosthetic arm. He is incredibly ugly, strange in 'an age of affordable beauty'.
• Hideo: Assassin and bodyguard for the Tessier-Ashpool family.
• Peter Riviera: A sociopathic thief hired by Armitage, capable of projecting life-like holograms.
• Julius Deane: Wealthy friend of Case's in Chiba with ties to the black market. 135 years old, "his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones."
• Linda Lee: Case's former lover. Dark hair, "gray eyes ringed with paintstick", 20 years old.
• The Dixie Flatline: A ROM personality construct of McCoy Pauley, one of Case's mentors. One of most advanced "console cowboys". Dead in the reality.
• Marie-France Tessier: Matriarch of the Tessier-Ashpool clan.
• Lupus Yonderboy: Leader of the Panthers Modern.
• Neuromancer: A personality.
• Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool: A member of the Tessier-Ashpool clan.
• John Harness Ashpool: Patriarch of the Tessier-Ashpool clan.
• Aerol: A skinny Zionite.
• Lonny Zone: A pimp in Chiba. He is addicted to a hypnotic called Cloud Dancers which make him incredibly calm and placid.
• Wage: A man in Chiba that Case owns money to at the start of the book.
• Shin: A waiter in Chiba that also deals in guns.
• Kurt: Another bartender at the Chatsubo. A Brazilian kid.

Quotes edit see section history

• ““You dealin' wi' th' darkness, mon.” “Only game in town, it looks like.””

• “"Mea­sure twice, cut once, wise man put it."”

  Maelcum, the Zionite

• “Wonderful, I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.”

  Dixie

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• “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. . . .”

  Highlighted by 173 Kindle customers

• THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

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• burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.

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• His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

  Highlighted by 82 Kindle customers

• He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.

  Highlighted by 75 Kindle customers

• Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

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• A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . . .

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• “There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent. . . .”

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• automatically—“La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.”

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• The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.

  Highlighted by 57 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Chiba City: Japan - located approximately 40 km east of the center of Tokyo on Tokyo Bay.
• Istanbul
• Freeside: space station
• Ninsei: Street in Chiba City, Japan. "Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart."
• Chatsubo Bar: Located in Chiba. The bar where Ratz works. Called the Chat for short.

Organizations edit see section history

• Yakuza: Japanese crime organization
• Turing Police: Police force responsible for keeping AIs from becoming too powerful and evolving beyond their intended roles. Sort of like Blade Runners but not as badass as Deckard.
• Tessier-Ashpool Family: A plutocratic family and corporation that extends it's life by rotating individual family members in and out of cryogenic sleep, only having one family member awake at any given time in order to govern the family/corporation. They're also responsible for creating the two AIs central to the story.
• Rastafari: monotheistic, new religious movement that arose in a Christian culture in Jamaica in the 1930s
• Panthers Modern: Nihilistic, violent youth mercernaries.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Cyberspace: The Internet as we know it today. In the book, cyberspace is a three-dimensional digital world a user enters and manipulates with any or all of his or her senses but it's structured and it behaves more-or-less as the Internet does today (only cooler and more 'science-fictioney').Although "Cyberspace" was first used in Gibson's Burning Chrome, it was popularized in this book.The book defines Cyberspace like this:"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..."Remember, this was written the early '80s, about a decade before the World Wide Web even existed. Very prophetic.
• ICE: Acronym for "intrusion countermeasures electronics".
• The Sprawl: Colloquial name for the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA).
• Simstim: simstim is a technology whereby a person's brain and nervous system is stimulated to simulate the full sensory experience of another person. Simstim is usually used as a form of entertainment, whereby recordings of simstim stars in soap operas are transmitted in effect replacing television
• Coffin: A cheap and small hotel room.
• Derm: A drug in a disc form taken by applying the disc to the skin.
• Mimetic polycarbon suit: A charmeleon-like suit that adapts to its background. Worn by the Panthers Modern.
• SAS: Acronym for Space adaptation syndrome.
• Fletcher: An arrow spitting pistol that paralyses or poisons target.
• Hosaka: A microchip manufacturer whose products are in wide use in Gibson's world. Hosaka chips and machines occur in all of the Sprawl novels. Hosaka is also a computer brand name "...next year's most expensive Hosaka computer...." The brand name is frequently used interchangeably to indicate the company and the device, much the way a modern brand such as Dell or Nintendo might be used as a "a Dell" or "a Nintendo" to indicate a particular object manufactured by one of those companies

Series & Lists edit see section history

Followed by Count Zero.

Preceded by Blood and Guts in High School, and followed by Flaubert's Parrot.

Preceded by I, Robot, and followed by Saturn's Children.

Preceded by The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)), and followed by Tropic of Cancer.

Preceded by Animal Farm, and followed by Watchmen.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. William Gibson (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Alex Antunes (Translator) - Brazilian Portuguese translator
2. Terry Carr (Editor)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Nebula (1984: Best Novel)
• Philip K. Dick Award (1984)
• BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) (Finalist, 1984)
• Hugo (1985: Best Novel, Winner)
• John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (Finalist, 1985, #3)
• Seiun Award (1987: Best Foreign Language Novel)
• Ditmar Award (1985: Best International Fiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3557.I2264 N48 1984
• Dewey: 818'.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Noir sex and violence.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Authors, A-Z › ( G ) › Gibson, William
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( G ) › Gibson, William
• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction › High Tech
• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Neuromancer - Wikipedia page
• Neuromancer graphic novel

More Books Like This edit see section history

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