Neuromancer
William Gibson
271 pages
published in 1984
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” The first time I read that sentence was a year or two after Neuromancer had been published; it immediately made all the science fiction I had read before seem oldfashioned and dull. Only other cyberpunk still seemed relevant, though none as relevant as Neuromancer. Gibson had seen the future and pinned it down for us to enjoy. Fast forward ten years and what seemed so radical then now looked dated and silly. It was clear Gibson knew nothing of computers, that his vision was a fraud and Neuromancer an overrated piece of hackwork. Fast forward another ten years and neither view seems true. Enough time has now passed to see Neuromancer for what it really is, a novel that sits comfortably within the science fiction continuum, one part in a thread that runs from Heinlein’s juveniles through Brunner’s late sixties disaster novels like Stand on Zanzibar to modern works like Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon or Stross’ Halting State.
It had been over a decade since I last read this; I’d convinced myself that Neuromancer was actually a bad book and Gibson a hack writer for a few years so I’d buried his novels in the back of my book collection and forgot about them. But having read both Snowcrash and The Diamond Age this year I felt the urge to reread Neuromancer as well and rediscovered that this is actually quite a good novel, if you can take it on its own terms.