Rating: Summary: Excellent cyberpunk, follows-up Johnny Mneumonic superbly Review: I found this book to be an excellent addition to the sci-fi community, a genre of which I normally do not like to read. I reccomend this book to everyone, especially if you enjoy the high-tech genre.
Rating: Summary: A razor bladed tongue and a dirty future Review: sentences were sharp and brief; if the future could get any darker, then we are truly doomed. I enjoyed Gibson's rapier style and his simplistic method of getting emotion from his characters. When Case jacked in for the first time (again) I cried with him, knowing that recovering a piece of your soul is unlike any absolution that any person can grant. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died. Literature I hope my grandchildren read in College.
Rating: Summary: different...then most Review: A friend told me about this book, let me read his copy. I did't know when the book was written but it seemed fresh. Most s/f books today just rip off old classics, i didnt feel this was the same story rehashed.
Rating: Summary: Simple and Great Review: I make time to read this book once a year, yes it's that good. Take a couple days and read it for yourself.
Rating: Summary: Mind-blowing Review: I can't believe it. This book was so potent and sharp, I'm still recovering from reading it. I am 15 and Australian, and I have read a lot of SF, but this novel was just something else. I've only read it once, and I wish that I could experience it again for the first time (cliche, I know). It was just such an amazing revelation. I don't have words to describe how this book made me feel, so I won't try. I suppose others who have read it know what I mean anyway. I've read reviews that say it's "cliched and hokey". I guess everyone's entitled to an opinion, but I think that these people weren't looking to be taught something.There's a darkness, a feeling of dread and utter helplessness in this book that completely enveloped me, and I truly think that it has changed the way I look at the world and our future. The slashing insight of this story is such that I just can't comprehend that it was written the year I was born. William Gibson is a prophet of the new world, and his predictions are frightening. He's 50, I'm 15. I better not let him generation-gap me.
Rating: Summary: It's not about computers; you just think it is. Review: For the many who seem to think Neuromancer is about computers, it's not. Many of the novels critics have remarked that Neuromancer's main character, Case, is a programmer who never programs. This is false. Reread the novel. While preparing for the attack on the Sensenet ICE case spends several days programming. Still, the criticism is more the misinterpretation of youth than anything else. The novel was written during the early '80's and videogames were its inspiration. Unless you had access to a mainframe at this time, programming was something you did by poking cheap BASIC programs into APPLE II's or Timex/Sinclair80's. Videogames were the rage. The desktop revolution had yet to happen but everyone had an ATARI game machine. That's why most of Case's ICE breakers come in cartridges to be slotted. Videogames are learned not through programming but body language. Case is more like someone who's mastered all the secret moves of Mortal Kombat than a programmer. Anyway, AI's do most of programming in the novel -- true programming in Case's world is a Metafunction, beyond human. Like pinball, videogames are style over substance. As is Neuromancer. But, ah, what style! So, back to the main point. Computers are not the point of Neuromancer -- information is the point and the control of information is even more the point! And, so style may not be deep but it is information. Ask any LA gang member if style doesn't matter. Style can mean life or death. Style conveys information about who purveys it. And like all good fiction, Neuromancer was about the time it was written. Neuromancer is about the feel of the '80's. During the early '80's there was the feel of something ominous and wonderful just beginning to happen. And Neuromancer captures that feel -- the feel of the early days of the information revolution. It may seem like were really into the meat of it now but it really is still just the beginning. So, read the book, and like Molly says,"Never let the little pricks! generation gap you." We may all be sitting around these days wearing Carpal Tunnel wrist braces but more than ever you still can't let the information juggernaut steamroller you.
Rating: Summary: Information is power and curency in a virtual world... Review: Having been in college for seven years I've read more books than I could ever possibly rememeber. The one novel that I read over and over is Neuromancer. It envisioned in the mid 80's what the internet and virtual reality technology would become. More importantly it examined the possible reactions of our culture to new, fast and glabal communications forms as well as the control major companies have as media sources become larger and less varied. Today we see companies merging and becoming larger while the number of individial media souces becomes smaller. Major corporations communiacte tv, radio, and internet yet each one no matter what form gives the same information. Neromancer is a frightening view of what can happen to us if we are not careful who we allow to control our access to informatioon. Microsoft.... Gibson-esque? Nueromancer will make you think.
Rating: Summary: a must read. Review: a must read (and reread, and reread), the definitive reference for the cyberpunk genre. -the "hobbit" of the new fictions.
Rating: Summary: The best SF book I ever read Review: I read Neuromancer twice and I found it really good. I appreciated especially the difference of rythm between the plot, that reveals itself very slowly, and the language that, on the other hand, is fast and minimalistic.
Rating: Summary: Germinal moment of a smarter, sexier, more dangerous world Review: I had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend awhile back. At 22, she's seven years younger than me; by the time she got to Neuromancer, she found it clichéd and hokey. And, oh, how I wished I could have taken her back to 1984, when as a soft & unworldly kid from the suburbs, I plucked the book off a shelf at the Penn bookstore. Before I had finished the first page, I knew I was in love. It swept my mind clean of sixteen years of accumulated clutter - a massive and total adrenaline dump directly across the blood-brain barrier that I have never entirely gotten over. There was nothing to do for it but finish the book, run away to the city, listen to anarchic noise in furtive dirt-floored West Philly basements, jack into thrilling & illicit lysergic idylls, find a girl with quicksilver mind & combat boots to keep me company... It's many years later, and OK, so Gibson's cyberspace has been leapfrogged by the considerably tawdrier reality; his characters ring hollow; his tech flakes to the touch like the handles of an old and corroded Chinese butterfly knife. But, as I told my girlfriend (hopefully without sounding too condescending): this is where it began. Whether she knows it or not, she lives in a hotter, faster, smarter, sexier and more dangerous place than she would have without the advent of Neuromancer. This book changed the world.
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