divine angst

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Mr. Angst recommended this to me last week when I was casting about for something new to read, of the fiction variety. Then he warned me that Gibson uses a lot of his own made-up terminology, and that might frustrate me. I actually like that sort of thing in books, though, so I wasn’t frustrated. I enjoyed it. I’m generally a big fan of near-future sci-fi, anyway, so it’s not too surprising that I enjoyed this book, the first cyberpunk novel.

I can’t really divulge too much about the plot because, if you haven’t read it, the first thing I’d want to tell you would sort of ruin the first 80 or so pages. So, just an intro, then: Our main character is Case, a “cowboy”—a professional hacker. Except he can’t access the matrix anymore because someone got pissed at him and made it impossible for him to jack in. Until he’s hired to perform a task, and thus the plot unfolds.

The thing about this book that really impressed me was its prescience. Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984. Yet he writes details that are remarkably familiar, something that requires a really good understanding of human nature. Technology, in his world, has not made things different—it’s just made the same things possible in different ways. Plastic surgery has evolved into genetic manipulation; tanning beds are replaced by tweaking the amount of melanin in one’s skin. A latter-day Vegas is now in orbit, attracting the same crowd as today’s Strip.

The book isn’t long and isn’t a hard read, though, as Mr. Angst mentioned, you do have to read closely and carefully or you’ll get sort of lost. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in technology, cyberpunk, human-machine interaction, and to anyone who read Cryptonomicon. (Although I might be the only person who read that book before Neuromancer.)