On a superficial level, Neuromancer is a caper story that takes place in a gritty, futuristic setting. Its protagonist, Case, is what we would think of as a hacker. Where we first pick up in the story, Case has lost the ability to hack because an enemy of his destroyed a part of his nervous system and prevents him from hooking into cyberspace. He is then propositioned by a mysterious man who restores his ability to hack, but only if Case is willing to do something for him.
Once readers delve deeper, the story is actually about artificial intelligence, technology, and what it means to be a living, breathing, human being. This may not seem like much, but take this into context: the novel was written in 1984, a time when few people had computers in their home and the world wide web was just a faint glimmer in Al Gore’s imagination. With that in mind, it’s amazing that Gibson crafted such a shockingly accurate tale of what the future (or the present, now) might be.
Admittedly, I did not really feel attached to this book until I read 1/3 of the way through. Gibson’s prose is so rich and dense that it’s hard to read quickly at first. He describes things in such detail that sometimes it seemed like I was reading paragraphs and paragraphs but nothing really happened. His techno-babble was also hard to keep up with, but I eventually stopped fighting it and trying to make sense of it; I just let it flow past me.
Having read it so late in my life and after having read and watched so many stories influenced by Neuromancer, I was disappointed I didn’t read it sooner. Maybe it’s good that I didn’t read it till now — I might not have understood a lot of what was written if I had this in my early teens, but I think my mind would have been blown if I hadn’t known of the hype surrounding this book. Despite the overblown expectations, I still enjoyed the book for what it was.
