William Gibson’s Neuromancer helped shape cyberpunk, bringing in much of the genre’s defining imagery and concepts. Published in 1984 , it followed a short story released the previous year called “Cyberpunk” by Bruce Bethke, published in Amazing Stories, which coined the term. Later that year, an article by Gardner Dozois called Science Fiction in the 80s in the Washington Post brought the genre to a wider audience. Neuromancer arrived at the right moment, helping to solidify cyberpunk and provide one of its foundational classics.

Note: potential spoilers below.

After many years, perhaps decades, of putting it off, I finally read it. I found it interesting more as a genre reference point than as a novel. It sits as an artefact of a time when stitching together now-familiar cyberpunk elements must have felt very new. We have seen these tropes many times: advanced technology touches almost every part of life; luxury exists for some, but the majority live in vast urban sprawls marked by poverty, crime and long-term environmental decay; megacorporations dominate society and governments; corruption and authoritarianism pervade; cyberspace offers an immersive, addictive escape into virtual reality; and Japanese influences, punk and hacker sensibilities, neon lights, and relentless rain define the aesthetic. Blade Runner, released two years earlier, had already established many of these genre features on screen, and Neuromancer later reinforced them in literature.

Fans of The Matrix will quickly notice that the movie’s creators took copious inspiration from this book. The story centres around a male hacker, Case, who gets recruited into a mysterious adventure by a beautiful, leather-clad young woman called Molly, herself a highly-skilled combatant. Her aloof employer requires Case to use his elite hacking skills in their version of cyberspace, called the Matrix, to perform a heist. Advanced artificial intelligences from the Matrix take over and manipulate humans. They visit a special region called Zion. Murder and mayhem erupts frequently, and a civilisation-changing truth awaits discovery.

All of this came many years before most readers experienced anything like the internet or the World Wide Web. Home computing had just arrived, and many would have encountered the concept of cyberspace for the first time via this book. Like other writers in this genre, Gibson thought we would inhabit it directly within alternative worlds in virtual reality. Today, that still seems some way off. Instead, we have settled on a version of cyberspace that integrates much more with our everyday world by transacting through smartphones and software like social media. It requires little direct immersion only our continual engagement.

Gibson also followed the common trope of treating AI as discrete autonomous beings, seeing them as much like humans but with greater capabilities. What transpires as AI today feels different. We have something that feels more like software tooling rather than a new kind of lifeform.

Despite all of the vivid, forward-looking imagination, as a novel it fell somewhat flat for me, mostly from the creative direction Gibson took with his writing. It relies far too much on vague, indirect exposition coupled with overly stylised depictions of places and action, along with masses of unexplained jargon. Take the excerpt below from early in the book:

Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue lacquered composition door at the far end. It popped, cheap hardware failing from the splintered frame. Darkness there, the white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob, leaning in with everything he had. Something snapped, and he was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Matsuga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind the arcade, filtering in through sootblown plastic. He made out a snakelike loop of fiberoptics protruding from a wall socket, a pile of discarded food containers, and the bladeless nacelle of an electric fan. The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched. It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame. Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle, triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head of the corridor.

Gibson apparently took influences from the stream-of-consciousness style of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. I see the resemblance, but Neuromancer left me feeling far more disoriented than Burroughs ever did.

I also wanted more depth to the characters and they ended up feeling like placeholders to move the plot forward. I truly never understood motivations and no one seemed to have a character arc. On top of that, the conclusion also felt little rushed and too reliant on exposition but it did wrap up the story as needed.

Yet I would still recommend reading Neuromancer. Gibson’s vision and imagination carries it. He created an imperfect story, but he kept me reading to see where it would go. It also seems to have influenced so much that reading it gave me a kind of second-hand, unspecific nostalgia that I found oddly comforting. It deserves a look from anyone interested in the genre.