With the Apple series on the horizon, a Neuromancer re-read was in order. We follow Case, a hacker with a death wish who can no longer access cyberspace after a deal gone bad. In return for curing his condition, he’s hired to hack a corporate AI.
Although Neuromancer is known for its popularisation of cyberpunk, little of the action occurs in the Matrix. This is mostly a classic heist: spend half the book getting the gang together, then pull off a complicated plan relying on a team riven with secret agendas, who don’t play well with others. Our view of the ‘80s Matrix is mostly performative flying through metaphorical virtual spaces to undertake visually stimulating attacks on corporate data redoubts – conceptually but not experientially prophetic. The quotidian reality of modern hacking has turned out to be much less cinematic.
The more significant impact of Neuromancer is the squalid, exploitative punk, in stark contrast to the chromed cyber apotheosis. In Case’s world, the elite live in orbital enclaves beyond government control, building unassailable dynasties through cryogenics and cloning. While the masses are entertained by simstim stars, ridden by voyeurs, or puppets hiring out the meat with their minds disconnected, their bodies exploited rather than liberated by technology.
This is early cyberpunk; simple, quick, and raw. Gibson’s characters are stylised, expressing their personalities through action with little interiority. Laconic Molly is perhaps the most interesting, dropping hints of the mythic backstory that forged her bad-ass persona. Her ambiguous relationship with Case is nicely done, mostly left unsaid for the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Nearly forty years later, Neuromancer still entertains. Gibson constructs a well-paced heist, and along the way invents a genre and a lexicon of neologisms that suffuse the zeitgeist to this day. While his later work is more sophisticated and technically accomplished, this doesn’t detract from Neuromancer’s readability and its historical importance in depicting a disposable humanity modified and commodified by technology.
