OMG read this book! here's why...

Maybe some would consider it a classic sci-fi novel. All I know is it gets talked about a lot: they say it started the Cyberpunk genre. They say its lost relevance because Cyberpunk came and went. It's brilliant, but not worth reading because the technology is too dated. The 80s vision of the Internet as a bunch of terminals and mainframes wired together, real physical wires, is long gone.

So I had to read it and see for myself.

...this is not that dated 80s vision of the Internet and the novel doesn't get nearly enough credit.

First Impression: Holy shit, this is the most ripped-off novel ever! Every sci-fi movie, RPG or anime I've loved is ripping Neuromancer off! If you like sci-fi, you've already seen bits of Neuromancer, stolen, dismembered and copied. To get Neuromancer, all you need to do is glue Shadowrun and The Matrix together, and coat it with Cowboy Bebop.

All the terminology is there. We speak of Cyberspace, William Gibson just pulled it out of his ass for this book. What we would call "The Internet" he calls "The Matrix". There is the first "Street Samurai", a character class in Shadowrun, and much of the game's jargon is just outright stolen: computer defenses are "ICE", people have "Single Identification Numbers", you "jack in" and "jack out", weapons are "fletchers", lasers and ninjas and the characters even make "runs". Is Cowboy Bebop's first episode titled "Asteroid Blues" because Neuromancer's first act is titled "Chiba City Blues"? Is Ed there simply because Neuromancer had Case for its hacker?

I don't think things like Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell would have happened without Neuromancer, but for some reason the Animes are better at adding original material to the mix than the Western movies and games. (The Japanese take Neuromancer as one of many ingredients and cook, Westerners just follow the recipie like they bought a box of cake mix.)

The ONLY story I can think of that's been THIS influential is Lord of the Rings. Started the whole Fantasy genre, been copied with dying races of Elves and hordes or Orcs and halfling thieves ever since (even when they don't make sense for the particular story, Tolkien had them so we must. So too, if Neuromancer had it, so too your sci-fi must.) But Neuromancer doesn't have a cult following to defend it against its thieves and put credit where credit is due. "Gibson" isn't rolling off of people's tongues with praise like "Tolkien". And it's a damn shame.

Halfway In: This is NOT the 80s future! This is tech that hasn't even happened yet, but also a funhouse mirror of things that are happening NOW. (As in, GOOD predictions.) There's a generation gap between the main character, an "old school" hacker, and the new kids. The "old school" is to sit in front of your cyberdeck, a big silicon box and wire "trodes" to your head, for full immersion into the Matrix/Internet. For maximum power in making a hack. The new kids have something cybernetic implanted behind the left ear they "slot" colorful chips into (and here Gibson describes even the packaging in detail, and it's the exact same kind of plastic "bubble" I've seen some delicate electronics in). Each chip is a different program (yeah, based on that quirky 80s thing where you had to put different color "floppy" discs in the PC to do anything) and they connect WIRELESSLY. Case the "old school" hacker is "jacked in" to his bulky cyberdeck, watching a deal through the Street Samurai's cybernetics, the "new kid" she's talking to just slots a hacking program and says "You have a rider, I don't like that."

All that is a mirror image of what's happening now, "old school" gamers like me only had this rube goldberg of TVs, consoles and wires when we were kids, and we got used to that. Big box in front of a big screen, with big stereo sound, funky controller in your hand with buttons at odd angles. Full immersion. The "new kids" with their iphones and ipads, tiny, and sleek, colorful tiles on the screen and always "wired" but ever really there or in the real world but always both. Neuromancer has that sort of generation gap between PC/console and ipad/portable.

Wierdest part of all - I find the chips behind the ear like some sort of piercing worn by the book's punks... strangely appealing. It's sexy tech. If it were available, I might actually go for it IRL. It's also puts the punk in cyberpunk, right there from the word go.

The hacking though... it's really the Hollywood pretty graphics style of hacking. Doesn't get "old school" with lines of code and zero-day exploits, but I kept expecting it to with my modern sensibilities. It's funny to think that, we're at a point now the average joe has some intuitive idea what computer hacking should be like, if nothing else but from having to dodge scams and cybercriminals every day, the "street smarts" of the Net if you will... Neuromancer's hypothetical tech avoids pitfalls by avoiding getting too technical and remaining abstract, and that's what felt wrong to me. I know what hacking is like, and it ain't pretty flyovers and FX, I wanted Case to be poking at lines of code, the bare bones and backdoors of computers (some things never change) but he never does. Like a fighter pilot, the "jockey" just rides the viruses. As Han Solo put it "But who's gonna fly it kid, you?" Case is the guy you call in to "pilot" your virus and break the "ICE", leave the coding to some even sorrier, paler couch potatos in China and Japan. :p

Finished Reading: I feel strangely dissatisfied, but the characters and the tech were done very well. Yeah, it's a bit dated, belonging more to the culture of the 70s "golden age" of sci-fi than today. Gibson has this almost Victorian style that's hard to read. Where Scalzi was turning over a new leaf when he first dared to use an adjective in the last book of the Old Man's War series, Gibson hordes adjectives like a packrat, never using the same one twice if he can help it. It's pure showing off to other writers. It forces you to THINK, though, no reading this book on auto-pilot, every two sentences you have to stop and figure out what he's describing. (It doesn't help that couch potato Case misses details right and left and has the reflexes of a tortose... what a pair of eyes to try and look through!)

Stylistically, Neuromancer belongs to that distant age, pre Matrix/Internet when a novel was like this stack of rich flapjacks, covered with syrup and butter and there were no health police to tell you to watch your fat and carb and sugar intake. It takes a long time to read, it's a self-contained "meal" and he shows off with as much sci-fi terminology as he can, that hey, he knows stuff about this setting you don't. The light system in the space colony isn't an artificial sun, it's a "lado-acheson" system. If you're curious, you'll have to go to the local library, look up that name in the card catalog, read more books about space colony designs, both real science and what other sci-fi authors have come up with. It's a book about the coming Internet, written for an age when there was no Internet to look over the author's shoulder with.

Overall, it's a heist story, interrupted. There's no big Hollywood meeting where all the players have been called together, they pick them up one-by-one, all unwilling pawns, each made an offer they can't refuse by their mysterious backer. There's tension and intrigue, but once the pieces fall into place at the end... they never do fall into place. The heist goes very, very wrong, there's no heroic moment, everyone comes out an anti-hero, and yet... it's all true to character. These are flawed people and it all makes sense for them to act in the flawed ways they do. Classic archetypes of Cowboy, Samurai, Ninja... and some WTF ones (space Rastafrarians) all given modern twists, it's brilliant, it plays out in ways I never expected. There's even a failed attempt at a perfect new society, fascinating stuff, but spoilers...

All the heist movie cliches are broken brilliantly, but I kind of was hoping for them? The book ends kind of like coming down from a drug high, in a crash. And given the main character's addictions, maybe it was meant that way.