Neuromancer

This is a book that, if you are approaching it for the first time, suffers from having been imitated so much that it seems derivative of its own successors. Neuromancer was genre-defining and it blew a million little geeky minds back in the day, but reading it in 2012, I failed to be enthralled by the goshwow factor. 'Cyberspace' is mainstream now, and stripped away of the novelty that made fans back in 1984 say "This is so freaking cool!" the book is kind of a techy-tech high concept thrill ride with cardboard characters.

So, Case is a 'cyberspace cowboy' who used to "jack in" to the Matrix and go on 'runs' (stealing data from big corporations, governments, etc.) in a near-future where the U.S. has fragmented into tribal/corporate nation-states, but the USSR is still around. (In the foreword to this edition, Gibson comments on his own prescience or lack thereof, acknowledging also all the other things he didn't get right which will strike modern readers, like the existence of payphones and the lack of cell phones.) He tried to steal from one of his employers, and in retaliation they poisoned him in a way that left him unable to jack into the matrix again. Now he's a down-and-outer in Chiba City (yes, there's a taste of 80s "Japan is so cool!" weeabooism here) when he gets recruited for a job by a mysterious guy named Armitage who says he can fix him up. Case also meets Molly, a "razor girl" street samurai. With the rest of his motley crew, Case goes on an adventure that takes him into high orbit to the playground of the super-rich. There are futuristic ninjas, artificial intelligences, and your basic cyberpunk RPG adventure. Again, not really fair to dismiss it like that, because this book invented cyberpunk RPGing and cyberpunk everything else, but unless you really love all things cyberpunk and/or Gibson, you may find, as I did, that Neuromancer just doesn't quite live up to the hype it earned in 1984 with its Hugo and Nebula awards.

William Gibson's writing is superbly clever and descriptive, and boy does he spin ideas. But this is the third book of his I've read, and while I appreciate his craft on a technical level, his stories just don't do much for me. I don't care about his characters.

For SF fans, this may be a good book to read to be familiar with, you know, the "seminal" works of the genre, but I just don't feel compelled to go read the rest of the Sprawl trilogy.

The one liners. So much disposable wisdom, it will always remain relevant because Gibson is a talented author.

It's like a western bank robbery set in the future, with Rastafarian pilots and girls with razors in their fingers. Sex and drugs and violence. Exotic locations, and realistic fantasies. Why hasn't this been turned into a movie yet?

Molly's voice. I actually wanted a different actress to step in and read her lines, because Robertson Dean sticks with the voice he's created for her well, but there are some lines that shouldn't be read softly. A dude speaking softly can never sound like a pissed off woman.

When Case see's the third figure standing with the boy, and Jane, and knows who it is, I actually got chills, the hard cold kind that cling to your back.

I listened to this because I've listened to Ready Player One about seven times now, and wanted something similar, so if you want cyber adventure, I'd say you should also check out Ernest Cline's masterpiece.

I've read this book a handful of times but had never listened to an audiobook version of it.
Honestly, the story is so vivid in my mind I was a little worried about what a bad narration would do to it. Well, never fear - Robertson Dean does a marvelous job! So it has been a treat listening to the story come alive through my headphones. Great job bringing the story to life.

The amazing language used by the author created vivid and realistic images in my mind. The reader's voice was a little creepy, at first, when he attempted the female character voices, but I became accustomed to the sound and compensated.

I can easily see that this was a primary source for many other stories and movies since it was released. Why have I never seen a Neuromancer movie? I mean, we definitely have the technology to create most of what I saw in my own mind. Johnny Mnemonic is the closest thing I have seen in the way of this style of story. Suddenly, The Matrix seems like a cheap copy-cat. I absolutely wish this story would be made into a movie.

Gibson reinvented the science fiction genre novel with his novel Neuromancer. A Verne-pitched, future novel that seems to have amazingly apprehended and captured much of the core and substance of the 21st century. The closest novel in both form and function is Stephenson's Snow Crash, but Gibson wrote this 8 years (an eternity in cyberspace) previous to Snow Crash. Gibson's prose (and clothing-fixation) is sometimes really REALLY annoying, but his style remains difficult to reproduce or replicate. Some writers can temporarily capture the asiangloss of Gibson's sprawl and cyberspace but lack the methgrit of Gibson's haunted prose clutter. Not a perfect SF novel, but still an amazing book.

I had a really hard time getting into this novel. The narration was really good but the storyline just didn't grab my attention like I thought it would. I thought I would really like it since I'm a science fiction fan, but perhaps this genre just isn't for me.

I enjoyed reading Neuromancer as a twenty year old when it first came out. I didn't know if I would still enjoy it twenty years down the road. Well, it's still love! It's obvious to me now that this is noir. it has more in common with The Maltese Falcon than with most sci-fi. It is just the right blend of melodrama, action, mystery, and campiness. I also really like the setting. Having grown up in the 80s, it makes sense to me. I dont know what it would seem like to a current twenty year old.

What is there to say about Neuromancer that hasn't already been said better by someone else? It defined a genre, and so much more. So much of what the internet is has been defined by Gibson's Sprawl books that it's hard to believe none of the terminology therein existed before he wrote it. Any fan of science fiction is morally obligated to read this book.

The reading takes a little getting used to. My husband joked that he sounded like a "computer voice," like the voice that Apple OS "reads" in. Once he gets going, Dean gets a bit easier to listen to, but the voice he uses for Molly is utterly ridiculous. In all fairness, it's probably pretty hard for a man to deliver her lines in any way that does not come off as ridiculous.

Still, I have an abridged audiobook as read by the author, and that is probably the best way to listen to this book. Unfortunately, it's abridged. This reading does make a nice compromise.

Console cowboys hold on to your seats. This classic scifi tale takes the reader of a roller coster ride across the sprawl as our protagonists find employment and a second chance. The story is excellent, but the reader's pacing seems off at first, but as the story ramps up, so does his rhythm.

I enjoyed listening to Neuromancer. Mostly for it's historical significance and concepts that are, for the most part, still fresh today. But I find that, in retrospect, Books like Gibson's Pattern Recognition are so much more polished and enjoyable than his earlier work.