Contents
Originally read in December 2022. Re-read for a workplace bookclub in February 2026. Really enjoyed reading it both times. I was surprised how many of my colleagues found it a difficult read and couldn’t finish.
Predictivity
Neuromancer was originally published in 1984. Gibson doesn’t pretend to be a computer scientist and predict how computing will progress, rather it’s an artistic interpretation of what the internet could mean for society. The society that has fully embraced the cyberspace future is clearly a dehumanized dystopia. The people are dominated by zaibatsus, organized crime, digital entertainment products, and drug addictions, and nature is utterly despoiled. It’s perhaps this dystopian angle, this increasing prevalence of the gnostic online life, which was Gibson’s deep insight, rather than the technological specifics. Neuromancer could be said to be about some people on this society’s seedy underbelly who use their wits to carve out a life for themselves and retain some scraps of humanity. This guy had another way of putting it, namely that cyberpunk is about exploring and coping with decline.
Influences
I haven’t read Gibson’s main influences, Edmund Chandler, William S. Burroughs, etc., but he has in turn influenced a lot of other artists.
Blade Runner came out in 1982 while he was writing Neuromancer so it is strange that they have such a shared aesthetic (that is arguably not shared by Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep): film noir, techno-dystopian orientalism.
I think it’s well known how much The Matrix owes to Gibson. The Matrix borrows so many of the elements of Neuromancer and in some cases handles them even better. An example of this could be the potentially difficult red-pill-blue-pill choice in The Matrix to accept reality, or to live in a comfortable (but not perfect!) false reality, versus the rather less difficult choice between reality and living on a grey and cold beach forever and eating military rations with your sort of ex-girlfriend. There are many little touches, such as the rave or reggae colony called Zion, ringing phones following the protagonist, and seeing the matrix as hieroglyphs, that make it clear how The Matrix was a kind of homage.
Beyond this though there are so many works that seem to owe William Gibson something. I always thought the Murakami novel Hardboiled-Wonderland and the End of the World was one of these (e.g. the Calcutecs and Johnny Mnemonic), although apparently Murakami denies this. There’s Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira of course. There’s that “It’s a UNIX system” scene from Jurassic Park. Although not acknowledged anywhere I can find, I would argue the Metal Gear Solid series shares some genes with Neuromancer. Not sure it’s worthwhile to continue listing the many other works that might be considered “cyberpunk”.
Poetry
Gibson has a great, poetic prose style which I find highly enjoyable to read. Some examples including the famous opening line:
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Case looking at the ninja stars in the shop window (p. 13):
They caught the street’s neon and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
The ninja star, a beautiful but deadly mercenary weapon, which Molly later buys for him as a present, and which at the end he throws at the TV screen, seems to be intended as a symbol tying the story together somehow. I guess it stands for the arc of the whole adventure, but also Case and Molly’s own (underdeveloped!) characters.
Case on the JAL shuttle taking off (p. 114):
Gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone.
Armitage in orbit around Freeside (p. 221):
But Case was seeing Armitage’s endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder that the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trench coat’s rich folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.
Case and Dixie riding the Kuang virus (p. 283–284):
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
The Head Name poem (p. 289) where the text is even formatted like a poem:
—now
and his voice the cry of a bird
unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name.
The first time I read the above I thought, oh, disappointing, he hasn’t told us what the true name was. 3Jane just sings “a true name”. This time around the thought occurred to me that the true name might actually be 3 wordless musical notes. This might make sense because elsewhere we’re told that the head’s voice has a musicality to it, e.g. p. 83 in the Finn’s story: “It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and organ pipes.”
Conclusion
Neuromancer feels very rock ’n’ roll. It’s a great adventure story, a great heist or infiltration story. There is poetry and humour. There’s good tempo, there’s danger around every corner, even when it’s not clear what the ultimate stakes are, i.e. what will happen if the AI is freed. There are memorable moments like Molly’s dramatic but doomed entrance into Lady 3Jane’s domain (p. 235), evoking this grand lineage of spaghetti Westerns, Hong Kong cinema, and jidaigeki. And there’s the climax when they finally give the Head the secret name. I think the world building is well done. He shows and doesn’t tell. Moments of direct exposition are veiled a bit, e.g. the “kid’s show” that Case briefly watches (p. 59).
Something that stood out to me more on this second reason was the question of what the Tessier-Ashpool clan (and in particular their matriarch Marie-France Tessier) were trying to achieve. It was more than just achieving great longevity through cryogenics and cloning while ruling over a pleasure colony in space. There was this idea of using the two AIs they built to achieve some sort of superhumanity, “a symbiotic relationship with the AIs”, eventually merging into a kind of Tessier-Ashpool-Wintermute-Neuromancer hivemind (p. 252).
On this reading I enjoyed thinking a bit about why each character had been selected by Wintermute for this motley crew that would free him. Case admits he’s not the best cowboy out there, but he was in such a desperate state at the start of the novel, and perhaps Wintermute thought his connection with Flatline was also useful. Peter Riviera was a dangerous choice. Was he the only one who could get an invite into the Villa Straylight? Armitage was just an empty shell that Wintermute could use and discard.
I have mixed feelings about the ending. There’s something unsatisfying there. It’s a cowboy ending, where Molly rides off into the sunset, looking for whatever comes next. There is not a lot of character growth throughout the novel. Without that perhaps Case and Molly really couldn’t be together. You would want Case to maybe have shown himself as more of a man, more of a hero. In the words of the freed AI, “Things aren’t different. Things are things.”
Some videos I found interesting
- How did you like the worldbuilding, indirect exposition
- Better Than Food
- Unsafe Space
- Kulture Dads
And I think another organic part of the Blade Runner world that attracts us is that everybody in these settings has inherent purpose because of struggle and hardship. Your life is hard. And because your life is hard, just living gives you a purpose. Today’s world doesn’t have that. Let’s face it: in the West if you say, I don’t want to work, you can collect welfare, you can live in some government building and just do nothing, and you will have all of your bare essentials. You won’t die. You’ll be able to go to a doctor in the hood. You’ll get food stamps. You’ll get everything and you can just live. And because of that, I think a lot of people feel when they watch Blade Runner that there is an organic danger to that world. That if they lived there they would have an inherent purpose. And if they fell off or fucked up, that they could die.
Really what cyberpunk is doing, as all great sci-fi is doing, is holding up Faustianism and saying, this sucks. Faustianism is a thing that people really lionize, and the dichotomy between the revolutionary spirit of the great man and the traditionalist spirit of the maintainer. Those things need to be in balance. What Faustianism is is those things completely out of balance. It’s the great man run amok with absolutely no guardrails whatsoever. And anybody who thinks that Faustianism is the spirit of the West or anything: completely out to lunch. That is a disaster. That is what Prometheanism is. Think about what happens to Prometheus in the myth. He’s not a hero. He ends up with his guts getting pecked out by an eagle day after day forever. This is a cautionary tale if there ever was a cautionary tale about technology.
Cyberpunk is no longer a relevant genre. That’s not to say you can’t tell good stories with it. You can. But it’s not relevant as far as its messaging goes any more. This is because cyberpunk was a genre from the 80s and 90s that was primarily about predicting the future. It’s a futurist kind of fiction. And pretty much all of their predictions came true, but not quite in the way that they were predicting. I am a literal cyborg [points to auditory implants]. You guys are figurative cyborgs probably watching this on a phone which shoots information into your brain 24/7. You are required by law to buy various kinds of corporate products including very expensive health insurance. And the corporations can turn off your bank account and access to the economy like that any time they want to base on what they consider thoughtcrime. So it’s a bit like reading Jules Verne. And what it tends to be in 2022 is reduction to aesthetics rather than the themes themselves.