Neuromancer

Neuromancer by William Gibson is a masterpiece. Everything cyberpunk is a cheap imitation of this book, whose quality cannot be compared.

The plot follows Case, a washed-up cybercowboy pulled along the never ending, murky, polluted currents of The Sprawl, where crime lubricates the gears of biotech and he peddles petty drugs, waiting to die. Instead, he is plucked out, rehabilitated, and placed on an eclectic team operatives tasked with a heist for which no one knows the reason. Together, they infiltrate Straylight, an orbital Eden for the billionaire family Tesser-Ashpool, where all becomes clear, and all comes undone.

Gibson’s prose is a masterwork of invented terms, visceral descriptions and subtle character writing. They combine to produce a story that feels entirely unfamiliar, difficult and fresh, even 40 years after its publication. His style perfectly reveals a confusing world of high-tech slums, and his influence on the Cyberpunk genre is impossible to miss; he literally coined the term ‘cyberspace’ and popularised the word ‘matrix’ as applied to digital environments.

Neuromancer is a true classic, difficult at first but unmissable. Gibson pushed the envelope of cyberpunk, and I am hard pressed to name anyone since who has done it better than him.