Neuromancer

By: William Gibson

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene - it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society. Neuromancer's virtual reality has become real. And yet, William Gibson's gritty, sophisticated vision still manages to inspire the minds that lead mankind ever further into the future.

©1984 William Gibson (P)2011 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Unforgettable ... The richness of Gibson’s world is incredible.” (Chicago Sun-Times)

“Freshly imagined, compellingly detailed, and chilling in its implications.” (The New York Times)

"Serious science fiction and fantasy readers cannot resist the classics.... That’s what makes the Penguin Galaxy series so appealing.... Each of the novels here has earned their place in the halls of literary history.... Their small form factor and minimalist covers call out to readers and make them fun to read all over again.” (Kirkus Reviews)

good story, bad medium for it though

feel like I absolutely would've loved reading this, oh well maybe I will some day

A Sci-Fi Classic for a Reason

William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' has become a classic for a reason, plain and simple. There are definitely some parts of the story which feel similar to some Cyberpunk Tropes, but it's important to remember that this could very well be the origin point for some of those tropes. I would recommend Neuromancer to any fan of Science Fiction.

Startlingly seminal

Prophetic and memorable. I also loved the afterward. Six more words required for minimum...

Interesting

While it is impressive that he had the vision to make a good description of the internet we all now take for granted, the story is slow and messy with more descriptions of the surroundings which makes the story slog rather than slide along.
I made myself listen to the entire story because it would have been a wasted credit otherwise.

Intriguing story.

The descriptions of scenes, environments, characters are sometimes really hard to follow. The story itself is well thought out, futuristic and nostalgic at the same time. But overall I had the impression of that certain parts of the story is unnecessarily long while others are not elaborated enough. But a science fiction must read nevertheless.

Evolution of a computer system.

If you could sum up Neuromancer in three words, what would they be?

AI ise Complex.

What did you like best about this story?

the complex cyborg/computer systems.

What about Robertson Dean???s performance did you like?

good voice

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

console cowboy

Any additional comments?

Cool book, worth the read, characters draw you in.

Great story... Reading could have been better.

I love this story. I was the 14 year old kid in 1989 that read this and was transfixed by the One Sendai, cyberspace, the mods etc. Yet this reading lacks a lot of nuance many of the characters. They seem to be "canned" accents that cause characters to run together. A better read than a listen but for long hours in a car will still do the trick.

Still wonderful and has aged well

This book has aged very well if you are will to forgive a few misses on the future. This is a must read for a Sci fi fan.

scintillating

from start to finish. vistas and realities that enthrall the listener. I can not recommend it more.

…I prefer situations to plans…

This book required two listenings for me; not that it is that difficult a book, just that I needed two tries to get myself plugged in to the literary and media gestalt that is audiobook listening. On the first pass I was evaluating it only on the level of the cool lingo and techno-noir dialog. Gibson’s terminology is so ripe that I wish I had a glossary to help me remember it all. If I could talk like his characters do I might even be cool. This is the way I first appraised it reading the paperback version years ago, and this is the only memory I had about the book. For me this book was seen as a sort of prose poem, the words were the thing. I just let them wash over my mind like a babbling brook over a moss covered rock. I never concerned myself with the story. It is the same way I engage with the movie Blade Runner: the visuals and the milieu are so convincing that I don’t mind that the story is thin. This was a mistake, for as cool as Gibson’s lingo is there is a story here. And, as I am intent on listening to the two sequels immediately after this, COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE, maybe, I thought, paying attention to what is going on in the first novel will enhance my enjoyment of the other books in the Sprawl series.

It helps me to know that this is William Gibson’s first book. That explains some of the passages where the action is hard to follow and the characters not fully realized. It does not help me to understand how Gibson could conjure up such a holographic vision of the future. I always hate it when outsiders, looking into the realm of Science Fiction, keep a scorecard on the prognostications made by various writers, as if that was the purpose of writing SF: to predict the future. Sure Gibson manages to foresee the coming internet computer age. It was predictable; many others have done the same. No, Gibson’s contribution is in melding the obvious computer age with cool techno-crime operators and the noir street sub-culture, and giving the resulting mélange a vocabulary that at once defines the culture and allows no room to question its validity. Gibson’s cyber-land has many of the technological advances we are now experiencing, but our world is nothing like the Sprawl. In NEUROMANCER we are presented with the gritty underbelly of the clean-room silicon-enabled technological culture that sometimes seems indistinguishable from magic. The Sprawl is populated with the criminal element that naturally would opportunistically arise to take advantage of the weak links in the system. Organized crime is fascinating if for nothing else its ability to capitalize on the weakness in any system. That, I believe, is Gibson’s great contribution to SF. He has extrapolated the advances technology would make like any good SF writer, then layered that future with a culture that is nothing like the modern actual cyber-culture, but one that seems far more interesting and strange while all the while maintaining a sense of inevitability, almost as if it were a sort of alternate parallel universe. If this is his first book, let’s discover how much clearer his vision has improved in his subsequent works.

The main reason I decided to listen to NEUROMANCER is that the two sequels are narrated by one of my favorites, Jonathan Davis and I wanted to review the first before tackling the others, having read it nearly twenty-five years ago. Robertson Dean’s reading of NEUROMANCER is conducive to appreciating the beautiful cyber-space prose in this novel. He has a wonderful somnambulistic voice; deeply intoned and well articulated, but with scant variation between the different characters. The female characters are particularly hard to make out sometimes. When this happens I know that I have not managed to fully see through the narrator and get inside the text. That is another reason I first approached this book on only the word level. His is not the most emotional rendering, but then the emotions of the book are below the surface level as well, so it is appropriate. On the second listening I decided to pay closer attention and extract all that I could from Dean’s voice. I still found myself drifting away from the plot unless I was able to focus on the story. But I did enjoy the second pass more than the first. Robertson Dean reminds me of another similar narrator, John Lee, who has a voice that I find so soothing that I tend to tune out the actual words and need to make an extra effort to stay tuned into the story. This audiobook can be experienced on purely the word level, but do strive to stay engaged to the plot; there’s a story in there somewhere.

This presentation features an introduction by William Gibson written in 2004, and an excellent afterward titled “Some Dark Holler” by Jack Womack. Both help give historical context to this very influential novel.