Neuromancer
William Gibson, 1984
Science fiction Economics & businessHistoryContemporary fiction
A burnt-out hacker for hire is paid to do the one thing his ruined nerves can no longer do: jack back into the network. A neon-lit noir that moves fast and stays cold, told in clipped street slang and dreamlike images of networks and memory.
Feels like dread, longing and wonder. About memory and identity.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy cyberpunk, noir heists, or prose that trusts you to keep up with its own invented vocabulary. Be warned that the slang and tech talk arrive unexplained, and the middle stretch can feel murky before the pieces connect.
Why read it
It shows where the glossy, wired future we now half-live in got its look and its vocabulary, and it does so with real melancholy rather than gadget worship.
A page from the book
The work that made him feel bodiless is now only a dream.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void....The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there. William Gibson.Gibson typed Neuromancer on a manual Hermes 2000 typewriter, having never owned a computer; the novel went on to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Neuromancer for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy cyberpunk, noir heists, or prose that trusts you to keep up with its own invented vocabulary. Be warned that the slang and tech talk arrive unexplained, and the middle stretch can feel murky before the pieces connect.
- What is Neuromancer like?
- A neon-lit noir that moves fast and stays cold, told in clipped street slang and dreamlike images of networks and memory. Feels like dread, longing and wonder. About memory and identity.
- What should I read after Neuromancer?
- If you liked Neuromancer, try Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (V.E. Schwab) and Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk).
A taste of the feed
What a sitcom family can give a kid who has none.
Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).
Ready Player One · Ernest Cline
The difference between being remembered and being known.
Last night, she told him hers was Jess. She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass. Hidden barbs designed to sting. What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue · V.E. Schwab
The night has no floor. There is only the sound of your own thoughts.
I come dragging in with every muscle bruised inside and out, but my heart’s still racing and my thoughts are a tornado in my head. This is insomnia. All night, your thoughts are on the air. All night long, you’re thinking: Am I asleep? Have I slept?
Fight Club · Chuck Palahniuk
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