This book should be so covered in shiny, spangly stars to indicate all the sci-fi awards it has received that the cover should look like the milky way and possibly be shinier and brighter than the sun. I just had the plain old paper back version with no spangles. Very sad. I like a nice bit of shiny. Any goodreaders who have already perused my shelves will note that I am not someone who has read a great deal of science fiction. Is this a glaring oversight on my part? Hmm maybe. I was persuaded to read Neuromancer because it is one of the 1001 books to read before you die and therefore is probably worth a punt, although that said, some of the books on that list are god-awful (Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School being a case in point) but no pain no gain and it all feeds into my OCD book list reading so whatever. If anyone came up to me and told me that they could explain definitively what Neuromancer was all about I would not believe them. Not for one second. Gibson rockets right off at the deep end with this one and you are left trailing in the wake of a spew of what amount to descriptions of geometry while trying to figure out what the hell is going on. (Hint: it's something to do with being in cyber space and stealing information by making yourself into some sort of human mass storage device in a post-modern industrial espionage way).Does this make this a bad book and a piss poor read? No, actually it doesn't. It makes it a confusing read, but then Gibson chucks in a few sentences which do make sense and that sort of fortifies the nerves and allows you to plough ever onwards. Overall it was oddly jarring, too full of geometrical jargon and tricky to focus on in place - like reading while jumping on a trampoline - but Gibson should be awarded top marks for daring to be different and for churning out future-fabulous phrases such as cyber space, microsofts and the matrix when even Bill Gates and his future megacorp were still in metaphorical short pants.

I am glad I decided to try this book after being sorely disappointed by Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash'. This is definitely in a different league and a much better book. True the prose is quite dense to start with and sometimes you are not very sure of what is happening for a few paragraphs, but I accept this as one of the writer's techniques to make us feel disorientated, and it is well in keeping with the themes the book explores. The story becomes much clearer towards the end anyway, and it has a great ending (in my mind). So no disappointment there. Some readers have pointed out the 'cartoony' feel of the characters. Frankly I did not think this was a problem. I just saw them for what they are: archetypes. As archetypes go, I found them fascinating. Humanity is flawed, or rather has become intrinsically flawed in this world and the characters themselves are not any Mary Sue you ever met. I found the portrayal of 'arch villain' Peter Riviera particularly chilling. I have already started the second book in the trilogy 'Count Zero'. It is a much easier read!

This book is one of the relatively few 5-Star books I can rate. On a scale of 1 to 5, one means stay away from this book. Five is something that changes your life after you read it. Gibson's Neuromancer is a definite five.Neuromancer is the story of a burned-out hacker named Case. Having performed the one unforgivable crime of his shadowy business - stealing from his employer - he has literally been burned out. A Russian mycotoxin has destroyed his nervous sytem so accutely that he is no longer able to make the man-machine interface necessary to his particular brand of hacking. He's offered a second chance though by means of a mysterious employer with even more bizarre motives. The job is multifaceted and difficult, but the fixer Armitage makes all of Case's dreams come true when he reverses the damage done to his body and sets him down the path of cyber-crime again.The real rating five stuff comes from two sources. The first is the most obvious: style. I have yet to come across another author who can bring this particular kind of setting alive. Gibson practically invented cyberpunk fiction when he wrote this novel. Read a couple pages and you'll come to understand the visual gift of words Gibson has.The second, more subtle reason for the five is that it goes over a very interesting point with a major character, an AI system named Wintermute that pulls Armitage's strings. 'What does Wintermute want?' Case asks at one point. His dead friend Paulie (a personality recording of a long dead hacker) answers, Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?'Reading that when you're a kid in high school will blow your mind. Opens up some perspective.Anyone looking for a good novel in a world just a few decades out from tomorrow, filled with dead men, AIs and future-noir crime should give this one a good once over. I've already read it six or seven times.