Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2509 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in Earth's computer matrix. Then he double- crossed the wrong people.… Winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards.

Synopsis
Tells the story of Case, a burnt-out software cowboy forced to do one last job in the infinite bytes of cyberspace.

Customer Reviews

I'm sorry but...
I find Gibson pretty much unreadable. I really struggled to finish this book as I just don't care about any of the characters. His style of writing seems much better suited to short stories, and he is an absolute master at invocation of mood and setting. I just find anything longer than a few pages intensely stodgy. Go and get burning chrome instead and tackle it in short chunks...

Vague, rushed, poorly defined.
This book suffers from an incoherent plot, ill-defined characters and a generally ineffective writing style.

I Didn't manage to finish this, though i rarely give up on books. I got to about 2/3rds through and realised i neither knew who these characters were or had any interest in their fate.

The internet has come to define our future as a race. Gibson has the honour of being the first Sci-fi writer to adress this fact extensively. This makes Neuromancer noteworthy but not a good piece of literature.

Visionary but spoiled by an incomprehensible style
I was left with very mixed feelings about this book - Philip K Dick meets Quentin Tarantino. It was written in the early 1980's and is clearly creative, visionary and ahead of its time in the concepts and contents. Personally I think it has aged pretty well, and has proved to be prescient for concepts such as cyberspace and virtual reality. One can easily see how it has created the ideas found in The Matrix series. Why just 2-stars then? Well, unfortunately its echoes are found in the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, rather than the original film which was excellent. Like the two sequels this book slides into incomprehensibility. The virtual reality concepts are overwhelmed by the constant repetition of obscure jargon, and an extremely opaque and confusing writing style. The first section of the book opens in a Tokyo suburb and the constant overuse of Japanese terms quickly becomes annoying. Characters are quickly introduced, and just as quickly disappear, with some very messy action scenes and dialogue. I assume the writer is being deliberately obscure in narrating what is actually going on for some sort of effect. Rather than atmospheric, I quickly found this highly annoying. If anything the plot becomes increasingly opaque, and the motivation and allegiances of the characters remaining obscure. Despite the fact I actually read the book carefully, I think parts of the plot (such as the machinations of the Ashpool family and what actually transpired at the Villa Straylight) partially eluded me. However, by this point I'd stopped caring and just wanted to finish it. I'm glad I read it, because of its place in the Sci-Fi genre, but I'm certainly not tempted to reach for another Gibson.
I can't help thinking this would have been better in the hands of a more competent writer, or at least one adopting a style designed to engage rather than completely baffle the reader!