Future imperfect (Neuromancer - William Gibson)

Member Name: nlingwood

Product:	Neuromancer - William Gibson
Date:	01/08/00 (31 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Neural magic

Disadvantages: the book ends

Inspiration for Cyberspace and the cyberpunk movement, William Gibson's first novel was a revelation. Among the group of writers in the early 1980s, he presented a new kind of future. The world he shows has high technology, but it also has the grime, danger and decay of urban life. The advances of technology are taken by the rich and powerful, or those criminals with the ambition and talent to take it for themselves.

Case is, or was one of those criminals. A computer hacker, he was maimed by his employers after attempting to keep a share of that theft for himself. Now he is drawn into an illegal plot alongside Molly, a cybernetically enhanced bodyguard. The images Gibson presents, of gritty sleazy urban life, or the visual world-wide network of the Matrix, have been integrated into our ideas of the future. Even the main thrust of the plot, the scheme for which Case is hired, is intimately connected with a cyberpunk theme: the growth of artificial consciousness.

Case's journey is a travelogue of locations. But what Gibson shows is not a glittering future, but a changed present, often decaying rather than clean and new. The date is unspecified; the world changed by war and future shock, but often familiar. Case finds something that resides deep within, or perhaps alongside the Matrix, an idea - explored in the books that follow - of the human within the machine. A fast moving, tightly written vision, not just of a future but of a movement within sci-fi.

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