In my quest to read more cyberpunk, after I read Snow Crash, I always came across Gibson and his Neuromancer. For the longest time I resisted because I thought it would be outdated and thus unrealistic (beyond the necessary suspension of realty). I am glad that I have finally read it and saw where cyberpunk came from.

The book revolves around cyberspace and AI and so on a lot more so than most other cyberpunk books do, which typically only glance upon that subject in a direct way. In showing the existence of an AI that can interact with an "online" user, as well as the security systems and so on we are able to see a rich, futuristic world, one that all cyberpunk fans should love to read, even though the book is 24 years old.

The characters, though, could be a little shallow and underdeveloped, but that isn't anything that I thought would be there in the first place. The plot, as well, is a little forced. For example, how quickly Molly and Case were with each other intimately, so quick you barely got to see them interact.

All in all though those are just minor nuisances to on otherwise fun and engaging read. I would recommend.

4 stars.

This book is amusing, and it certainly can take credit for starting a whole sci fi genre.

However, the basic idea that you can plug into someone else's stream of consciousness is flat out wrong. That's not how your brain works, and no technical advance is going to change that.

It's a little hard to explain, but consider the scene where the guy is plugged into the girls brain and she teases him by playing with her nipple. He feels something different than what he would feel if he did that to himself.

But how could that work? The part of his brain that would be processing the sensation is missing, because of anatomical differences between their brains.

The idea here is that he is a humunculus sitting in a "theatre of the senses" taking in all theses sensations, which are the end product of the inputs to and calculations of his (or in this case her) nervous system. The question is, how can anything but his nervous system be taking anything in?

In short, cyberpunk is based on the dualist fallacy. Philosophers have spilt a lot of ink on the subject. A good starting point is "The Mind's Eye"

Neuromancer is the greatest cyberpunk novel ever. It is definitely a must-read. The main areas of interest are the depiction of the future dystopian world Gibson had created. Gibson presents to us a desolate world where anarchism replaces government control, and a world which operates upon an international network, known as cyberspace. (Gibson's prediction came true with the birth of internet, thus internet was also named 'cyberspace')

People might find the beginning of this novel is rather slow and hard to absorb. I, myself, had to reread the first part several times to get the story into my head. Readers might also be stumped by the use of some unfamiliar terms, such as japanese words and names of tech gadgets.

But your efforts to read this novel will eventually pay off, because in the latter part, the plot becomes more engaging. New characters start emerging, more twists in the plot appear. But as I have said earlier, the main area of interests are the descriptions of Gibson's future world, not so much on the twists in the plots.

This is novel that you make you ponder. The depiction of this future dystopian is appears to be real; some of the predictions are already happening today. Besides, the emotional pain experience by the anti-hero, Case, is something I can identify with.

It is also obvious that the character Molly has also been copied/influenced in other works, such as The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell.

This book is definitely on my favourite list.

"The Sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel"

Even now, more than 20 years after its initial publication, Neuromancer's richness and complexity mark it as a work of quality that has been seldom matched in science fiction.

At its most basic, Neuromancer is nothing but a 'big heist' story that we know well from movies and television, but this one comes wrapped in prose that was almost unimaginable for science fiction writing. It combined voices, techniques and imagery that were simply beyond most science-fiction--using elements of voice recognizable from writers as diverse as Dashiel Hammet to William Burroughs--that lift the book high above what you expect genre-fiction to achieve with descriptions of future places, characters and technologies that capture the imagination on page one and that never, ever let go.

Like any book, Neuromancer is not without its flaws; but without its groundbreaking influence, Neal Stephenson would be famous not for Snow crash or the Cryptonomicon but for his essays on computers and technology and for his mercifully obscure first novel, 'the Big U.'

I was disappointed by Neuromancer. I generally find authors that I like then devour their entire body of work. I won't be ordering other Gibson books. Several reviewers have said that they would have rated the book lower, except that it was influential in creating a new kind of sci-fi genre and one mentioned the effort that had gone into the writing of this book.

That would be nice if this were a piece of art hanging on the wall I suppose, but for me it is a book that I want to read and be engaged by while I read it. I am the same way with my art though, Picasso may be a genius, but cubism looks stupid to me and I don't enjoy it. Same with this book, it may have started a new genre of writing, but I just didn't enjoy it.

Why? First of all, contrary to some of the posts here, it DID feel dated to me. Not so terribly that it ruined the work, but it added to my dislike. Mostly, I never felt the scenes were described well enough for me to picture them in my head. I trudged onward through the book to see what was going to happen next, but often I wasn't completely sure what had just happened. One reason for this was that the book was full of terminology and slang that was not well-defined or clearly explained. So I wondered what a Panther Modern was and what a coffin was used for and if it was for storage, why wasn't it safe? I felt like I had been dropped into a sequel and should have known a lot of things that I did not know and could not easily find out.

I finally gave up. It was a lot of work to read this book. I spent too much time trying to figure out what some slang term meant, instead of enjoying descriptive writing that painted a picture.

I do not recommend this book.