Neuromancer by William Gibson

The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

So begins Neuromancer, one of the most acclaimed SF debut novels of all time. Note that nature is compared to technology, and to death. Cyberspace is inherently an internal phenomenon.

Case was once a semi-legendary computer jockey riding the information freeway -- jacking his mind into cyberspace, soaring through vast arrays of logic and data that seemed the size of skyscrapers, stealing secrets for those clients able to buy his talents.

When he double-crossed the wrong clients, they caught up with him and burned his nervous system with a Russian mycotoxin. Japanese microbionics and nerve-splicing experts took his money and left him crippled. Unable to enter cyberspace, trapped in his maimed body, Case seemed finished as a software cowboy.

Then Case met Armitage, and a second chance seemed on offer; one that he had to take. For while Armitage could cure him, he could also kill Case. For bonded to the lining of various main arteries were fifteen toxin sacs, which were slowly dissolving. Each contained the same deadly mycotoxin...

Resurgance of Hard SF

Throughout the early 1980s SF was re-trenching from the effects of the resurgance of hard SF through Analog, and the collapse of the anthology market; it has always been a genre reliant on periodic infusions of fresh blood, and by 1984, the next wave was overdue. The late, great Terry Carr, editor at Ace Books, took the bold initiative of resurrecting the Ace paperback originals line, and published a slew of first novels; Lucius Shepherd's Green Eyes; The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lewis Shiner's Frontera, another novel grasped by the cyberpunk movement as emblematic. Both the latter novels were Nebula Award finalists.

Gibson's Cyberpunk Classic

But it was Gibson's cyberpunk classic that influenced a whole generation, from countless other writers to music to advertising campaigns -- particularly in Japan, with which Gibson's novels have always had an affinity. It is hard to overestimate the power of the opening pages on a jaded readership. In fact, on re-reading it is noticeable how minimialist the novel is, the reader's own mind supplying much of the imagery.

Case would return in two more novels, Count Zero in 1986, and 1988's Mona Lisa Overdrive, but by then Gibson's impact was fading -- the latter novels show a writer's struggle to turn three novels into a trilogy while leaving them freestanding enough to read independantly.

But no matter -- it is Neuromancer, and its phenomenal impact, that deserve to be remembered.

Print Article

Email Article

View All Articles

How to subscribe to feeds