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Neuromancer

Neuromancer

List Price: $6.99
Your Price: $6.29
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Too Much Jargon to Wade Through
Review: I must admit I am not a frequent reader of sci-fi and had never read cyberpunk. Gibson uses great dialogue and fast-paced action to keep the reader enthralled. However, I found my interest frequently halted by Gibson's use of terms. Many parts were slow to wade through. This book explains why many people are turned off by sci-fi, they may feel as though they have to be an expert in its jargon to read a book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Essential item for any reader.
Review: You know how a real music afficianado owns at least a few items of each genre, usually the exceptional examples of say Jazz or Psychedelia, even though the person's personal preferences lean towards Fugazi?

This book is for literary-minded tastes. It's the kind of science fiction that best exemplifies the mixture science *and* the fiction aspects of the genre, without compromizing either. The science is prognostic, the fiction is taut and addictive.

Arguably, best of genre.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This is a great book!
Review: Yes, the character devolpment in this book is not overly detailed and normally that would be a negative. But this book is a fast-forward ride into the future. You are not meant to know intimate details of each character because that would disrupt the intensity and purpose of the book. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to drop someone from the 17th century into our time period? Now imagine yourself as that person, dropped hundreds of years into the future and everything is a blur. . .sensory overload! Gibson achieves this effect perfectly. If you like everything described for you, in the utmost detail, then stay away from this book. If you like to utilize your own imagination and you are open to a unique and challenging writing style, then you will be impressed with this book. I've not read anything else like it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Mindwarping Novel of Ingenuity
Review: This story takes place in the next stage of humanities existence. The computer nueral interface opens up an entire world ripe for the action. Gibson is God. The struggle between man and data leaves the reader asking, Do we have a chance? Any possibility of surviving the age which allows the mind to set the limits. This book is stunning and will leave the reader wanting a world in which the opponents exist only in the mind.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Hero? what Hero?
Review: William Gibson, in his novel Neuromancer, tells a story far deeper than merely Cyberpunk fiction. Within the covers of this book rests a story about love, life, humanity, and how not to backstab the wrong people. Gibson demonstrates all of these things in a Cyberpunk realm that seethes with scum and wholly unlikable people. Enter our "hero," Case, who is part of that scum. Through the course of the novel, Case is forced to come to terms with his own life and choices, and he learns to realize that he must rely on someone other than himself sometimes. For a Cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer actually deals a great deal with love. This is a parallel to John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, so the story is a little lighter than other Cyberpunk such as the movie Blade Runner. Also, Case seems then unlikely character to fall in love; and the object of his affection seems just as improbably to have any feelings, let alone love . By using a seedy character, Gibson reveals to us that everyone can have a change of heart, whether they want to or not. Finally, the main storyline deals with the questions, "What is human?" and "What is alive?" Tossed in for color also is the question, "How exactly do I repair severe nerve damage to my brain for under $10,000?" That's where the second moral to the story comes into play: never steal from your employers. All in all this book defines Cyberpunk in a way that will appeal to new and old readers of the genre, and it will pave the way into a whole library of Cyberpunk fiction.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: The reviewer above who gave this book one star is essentially saying that Neuromancer is a bad book because he didn't understand it. How shallow can you get.

I read this book twice and each time got an enormous amount out of it. One reading just doesn't do it for this one. What some call Gibson's "confusing" style is actually a carefully calculated and ingenious device to make the reader actually feel as if he has been dropped into Gibson's world. He doesn't introduce aspects of his future like they're just wacky things he made up (whereas Neal Stephenson DOES), but rather like they are actual things whose history he is recording. His vividly imagined world takes on an eerily realistic quality this way. You learn to find your way around his world like a child learning a language- you just have to listen to it and wait.

Gibson has a lot of fun extrapolating social phenomena into the future, in the same way that lesser scifi writers meerly like to dream up new technologies. And he addresses the issue of man's relationship with the machines he creates like nothing else- to what extent are we machines? what is the human mind ultimately capable of, and what are its intrinsic shortcomings?

The bizarre humor of this book is a delight. The characterizations of Ratz and The Finn, for example, are absolutely classic. And the description of Case and Molly's run on Sense/Net near the beginning of the book is one of the most funny, gripping, intense, and fascinating sequences you will ever read.

Like it or not, this book is incredibly real. Neuromancer is exciting, intriguing, beautiful, decadent, surprising, upsetting, and an all-around incredible page-turner.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Bible of Cyberpunk
Review: Almost universally acknowledged to be the "Bible of Cyberpunk", William Gibson's NEUROMANCER is cyberpunk boiled down to its core. The story of data thief Case, street samurai Molly, and the mysterious Armitage, NEUROMANCER overloads the senses with a non-stop barrange of information. Gibson's masterful telling is razor sharp and completely plausible. Hopping around the world at the speed of information, NEUROMANCER is a roller coaster from start to finish, so well polished that one reading will not be enough for most readers to digest the entire meaning.

Anyone interested in hard fiction or science fiction in general should read this masterpiece of cyberpunk.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: a Bad read
Review: You know how there are some books you just can't put down? Well, this is one of those books you just can't put up... The book is confusing, with confusing characters and a plot that will easily bore seasoned sci fi readers. It just doesn't make any sense and the author looses his audience by making up his own world in such a way that you just can't follow it. I am very disapointed with this book. The characters have no 'light' and the sequence of events is a total mess. I'll give it credit for originality though. It's an orginal book in the way it bores the reader. Avoid.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The very definition of cyberpunk.
Review: When people talk about "cyberpunk", they're usally refering to one of two things. The first is Blade Runner, and the other is Neuromancer. Read it. Read it twice, because unless you're Albert Einstein or William Gibson, you're going to miss stuff and get confused, especially towards the end. The pace is incredible, but the world is totally believable, and even though the plot isn't the greatest, it's one heck of a ride.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Neuromancer
Review: I was disappointed with this book. The book had potential to be very interesting because of the subject matter. However I found that it had poor character development, the plot was rushed and the technology portion seemed to be over-emphasized.


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