Took me a while to get through this novel because I found it quite demanding for a few reasons:
- I wanted to visualise the characters and setting which I found hard to do while simultaneously holding onto the varied plot points, characters, and settings
- A lot of my reading lately has been in bed which means I only get a few pages in before dozing off
- My mental state hasn't been particularly conducive to concentrated, attentive reading
- Conceptually I found it difficult to grasp the protagonist flicking through cyberspace depicted in the abstract
- I found the characters and setting quite unlikeable, which made it an at times unpleasant book to read
Neuromancer follows Case, a low level criminal and former netrunner, who’s living a reckless drug-fuelled life in Night City—a high tech Japanese city where body modders sew circuitry into flesh and organised crime roams freely. “Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button” (8).
After stealing from one of his gangland employers, Case gets kidnapped and dosed with “a wartime Russian mycotoxin” (6) that damages his nervous system so he can no longer jack into cyberspace, the matrix. “For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall” (6). This is full cyberpunk so cyberspace is something you can hook your brain straight into leaving your body behind. It’s a vision of the world that, 40 years later, feels a little close to reality for my liking.
Case is entirely motivated by selfish means. He gets approached by an assassin named Molly (who has metal coverings over her eyes and retractable blades in her fingeres) and is co-opted into joining a small group led by the strict, planned, disciplined Armitage whose face looks like a mask. They need a l33t h4ck3r and Case is their man. So they get his nervous system fixed so that Case can once again enjoy the exultant joy of cyberspace, only now he’s been injected with sacs of poison that will dissolve unless Armitage gives him the cure. Oh, and he’s got a new pancreas that won’t metabolise drugs.
So that’s the rough setup. Then we go on this wild heist journey that it turns out is being run by (spoilers) an AI called Wintermute that is trying to fuse itself with another powerful AI created by an uber wealthy family who live in a compound in orbit where they are cryogenically frozen. See, it gets kinda weird.
One of the first things this rag-tag trio does is steal the AI construct of a world famous hacker called the Dixie Flatline: a guy who kept going too deep into cyberspace and having his brain fried, hence the name. The Flatline is in essence a ROM that Case can talk to. Something akin to a large language model finely tuned on his personality and unique expertise.
What struck me while reading Neuromancer is just how closely the Flatline resembled tech that has become, in 2024, totally unremarkable. For the most part, Case just talks to it. He asks the construct questions and it directs him in the direction he wants to go. Even in an early instance when he uses the Flatline for a specific hacking task, the ROM is really just instructing Case:
“‘Here,’ said the voice, ‘I’ll do it for you.’ The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.” (90)
Gibson’s vision of the future is one of deep corporate power. “The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality.” (224)
The only real sense of state comes in the form of the Turing Police, an international agency in charge of stopping AIs from running loose and who catch onto Wintermute’s plan because of the way it restructured a handful of multinational companies in order to buy a back alley clinic where it can fix up Case.
The AI’s interactions with physical are very clever because it’s not embodied in robots, but speaks to Case through his neural cyber interface, torturing him with memories and faces from his past, using them as avatars for its own gain. Wintermute is manipulative and deadly. It slowly plans its escape over the course of years and decades, finding people who can act on its behalf in the physical world, meatspace.
Whether intentional or a feature of Gibson writing in the 1980s, so much tech remains physical. People have sockets in their head where they put shards of software, the Dixie Flatline is stored in a cartridge. Perhaps certain trends toward physical media like vinyls or CDs will return not just as retro fashion but a direct response to AI threatening to annihilate the humaan element of digital media.
Overall, I enjoyed large portions of Neuromancer but Gibson’s prose style, the unlikeable characters, and glib view of a cyberpunk future we’re close to inhabiting made this a bit of a slog.