Neuromancer

Somebody traded this in along with a stack of other paperbacks, spine cracked white in three places from being read hard by whoever had it before me, and I put off actually reading it for longer than I probably should have given how often it comes up. Case is a burned out hacker, cut off from cyberspace as punishment, pulled back in for one last job by an employer with more going on than he’s letting on. That’s the setup. The plot itself is denser and more fractured than that summary suggests.

I’ll admit what a lot of other readers have admitted too, I had to restart this one. Got about a hundred and fifty pages in the first time through and realized I’d lost track of who several people were and why they mattered, so I went back to page one and read it properly the second time. Once it clicked, it clicked hard, the prose has this compressed, almost overloaded quality, dense with invented vocabulary that Gibson mostly refuses to explain, which is either thrilling or exhausting depending on the day you’re having with it.

What holds up best after forty years is less the specific technology, some of which reads almost quaint now, and more the mood, the sense of a world run by corporate interests bigger than any government, addiction and augmentation treated as ordinary as furniture. Reading it now is genuinely a different experience than reading it in 1984 must have been, less shocking, still oddly current in the parts that matter.

Character work is thin next to the atmosphere, I’ll grant that complaint, Case and Molly both feel more like functions of the plot than fully lived people at points. Doesn’t stop this from being worth the disorientation. Just go in ready to maybe start over once.