Rating: 
Summary: Neuromancer...A kick in the face, never-tiring adventure!
Review: I've read this book over and over. Count Zero, & Mona Lisa Overdrive, hot on it's tail in this series, bring this complex And intelligent story to a brilliant close. Gibson has fused a web of colorful characters with wit and fresh style to a very tired sci- fiction genre. His cyberpunk edge has delivered a new birth in hip, And almost too scary realism of social chaos, to the forefront of this glance of the future.
Rating:
Summary: Neuromancer... It just doesn't get any better than this!
Review: I just finished reading NEUROMANCER yesterday, and to be honest, I am still stunned...
Like many others who have read Gibson's complex, dark and seductive tale, I at first found myself stumbling over his use of language. I remained intrigued, however, by his descriptive methods as well as the intricate way he weaves a plot. Gibson is a master of mood, and it is mood that runs away with the reader's imagination.
For an example, his development of NEUROMANCER's characters has been widely critisized as flat and generally lacking in depth. This hasty judgment is false, however, and is probably the result of reading years of science fiction works that spell out every nuance about a character and force feed them into the reader. What Gibson achieves, through a minimalistic approach, is a fusion between the story's disturbing, yet compelling mood and the essense of his main characters. His characters are "flat" and "cliche" because THAT IS WHO THEY ARE!
Allow me to expound upon this... Imagine that you, for a brief moment, are Case (the main hero/anti-hero of the book).
A burnt-out shell of a man living within a burnt-out shell of civilization. You "live", if that's what you can call it, day to day, haunted and pursued by the memories of who you WERE and what you COULD HAVE BEEN. Your talent, your identity and your soul has been stripped away -- all because you took one wrong step. No longer able to jack-in to the matrix and feel your consciousness freed from your fleshy prison. No longer able to cut through Cyberspace with the precision of a surgeon and intensity of a kamikaze. You are a nobody, a drug-addicted fixer with a death wish. No longer caring; slowly suffocating in a world filled with the jackyls and parasites of humanity, who are ready to feast on your corpse the minute you fall. You don't even carry a weapon anymore... You have given up and are in many ways already dead. All that remains is for someone to kill the "meat"...
What more is there to say? This IS it!! You know who Case is because you, the reader, can FEEL it. That is the magic of Gibson's writing. He doesn't go into the intimate details of Case's torture in Memphis because there is no need to. Just as there is no need to encapsule the characters in neat little packages and paint them in bright technocolor, making them "easy to swallow" for the reader. They are bleak and minimal just as the world they live in is bleak and minimal.
Just as some of the most frightening horror films are the ones that don't show the gore -- leaving it up to the viewer to imagine (which is often far more gruesome), so too does Gibson leave you with just enough so that you can feel the consuming emptiness of his characters.
In addition to this, Gibson does a fantastic job with the plot of the book. At times it is a head-first dive at a hundred miles an hour, and other times is crawls with the primal anticipation and potential energy of a spider, slowly descending upon the prey within its web. This plot isn't made for "Short-Attention-Span-Theatre", and only those suffering from Attention Defecit Disorder or expecting this book to be a Cyberpunk module (often the same people) need fear it.
The characters are driven by forces that are often as ambiguous as there own nature, and this tactic is perfect in capturing the essense of the book. Gibson doesn't bore the reader with 200 extra pages to "define" why the characters act as they do. Instead he hints at it through their personalities, sparse backgrounds and conversations. The essense of who they are and why they do what they do seeps slowly into the reader's skin through the derm that is Gibson.
That is what makes this book a classic on so many levels. The reader is just another character along for the ride instead of being forced into omnipotence.
BEWARE OF OTHER REVIEWS BY PEOPLE WHO DON"T HAVE THE FACTS STRAIGHT!!!
Gibson stated that he knew nothing about computers or the internet before he wrote NEUROMANCER. While some have said that "this certainly shows" in his writing, these short-sighted individuals have failed to realize that barely any of this technology existed at the time. Almost NO ONE knew anything about it!!
Secondly, people have critisized Gibson's status as a "visionary". Here too, these individuals don't comprehend that this title was not self-proclaimed. It has been the result of 20/20 hindsight vision from a late 80's to late 90's perspective! This book was written in 1984!! Cut the guy some slack!!! He never claimed to "predict the future", but his future is a dark possibility rooted in our own present. That is the essense of his foresight into the fusion of advanced technologies and the corrupting nature of humanity.
Finally, one person who reviewed this book on Amazon.com claimed that the only reason this book got published was because of Gibson's "name" and his prestige as a writer. This was his first book!! Obviously that isn't a likely scenario. The reason it was published can be ascertained by reading the first sentence of the book!
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
To any one who is a serious science fiction reader, or any one who has ever wanted to pick up just one book to get the feel of the genre -- READ THIS BOOK. It IS a classic, and I feel that it will only get better with each read...
Rating: 
Summary: Novel, but hard-to-follow
Review: I enjoyed it, and it's worth getting (if only because it's used as a point of reference) but after reading all the reviews I expected more. I found Snow Crash more enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: My heart won't slow down!
Review: For me the true test of a good Cyberpunk story is that my heart is still beating fast after I finish it. I did love the whole book, I just love how the plot slowly weaves everyone together. But, as I scrolled through the page I mostly read those who didn't like the book. Three of them mentioned Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ which I found good, but, the constant asides to explain everything irked me, I much prefer trying to figure them out like _Neuromancer_, it makes the stories flow much better. Now for Besher, I did like _The Demolished Man_ but, it felt to me like Ray Bradbury writing Cyberpunk. Well we are different, but, for something really different try Paul di Filippo's _Ribofunk_.
Rating:
Summary: Neuromancer's Style Rockets You Into Plot
Review: Neuromancer paints a unique picture of the future, but his idea could become reality. Crazed corporate families, rastafarians in space, even the idea of 'console cowboys' is innovative. Although the beginning of the book and some sections of the plot were sketchy, the book swept you into the reality of a few souls in their confusing lives. Some people may say that style tried to make up for a weak plot and undeveloped characters. Gibson's style helps push you into a different view of the world, so that you can explore inside on your own.
Rating:
Summary: Prophecy a'plenty
Review: William Gibson seems to have channelled the future right back into the late 1980's, when he wrote this book. Knowing that the nerve splice is still nonexistant, but imminent, clues the knowledgeable reader to just how well Gibson interprets the world economy today, alongwith its inevitable affect on tomorrow. The world moves on, as another famous author reminds us, (SK) and it appears to me that Gibson has more of a handle on reality than many give him credit for. The lost and somewhat illucid character of Case, alongwith the tussle-ready Molly, speak of a street sense learned the hard way. My favorite clip is where Molly slaps a captive who was causing trouble in his own weird way and tells him something like "...I can hurt you real bad, and not leave a mark on you...I LIKE to do that...". The book will grab and pull and color your emotions, making it a very quick and enjoyable read. Too quick, you ask me. I have reread it several times, and plan on doing so again. Palimpsest-like, the scenarios of the book truly reveal themselves through the minutiae of repitition. To me the book explains a lot, and says "Prepare...prepare for what we ourselves have wrought. The worldwide AI race began around 1983, and was already fairly old news by time this book was written, but because of the scantiness of information on that subject, along with the myriad military applications inherent in AI, anyone must know that the reality far surpasses the false front of the technology brokers everywhere in the world. I was able to glean a little more about AI from this book, Though not as much as from "The God Project", and some others. The best is Feigenbaum and McCorducks "The Fifth Generation: Japans Computer Challenge to the world", 1983. Gibson touches on the funny similarity between possible definitions of the term AI, and even goes so far as to stipulate it as "Alien Intelligence, as well as Artificial Intelligence. The book is great, and will take you through a long flight or other trip with no problem at all. Definitely NOT a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Hostile corporations, technology, drugs, and existentialism
Review: Gibson's anti-hero Case is Albert Camus' Stranger and Kafka's Joseph K. plopped into a twisted surreal future that seems all too plausible. With Case, Gibson explores escapism into artificial pleasures, technology that grow faster than man's ablilty to utilize it wisely, and man's seeming smallness in the grand scheme of the universe (which may be represented by the corporations here).
Rating:
Summary: The Best Cyberpunk Thriller Ever Written!!
Review: This dark story of a future twisted in new technology really will catch your attention. Some parts of the book might be hard to follow for people that are less experienced with this genre. However, I do fully reccomend this book to anyone that would like to escape reality. If you like subjects such as Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020, then this is the book for you. I think that William Gibson did a wonderful job on creating this masterpiece. I give this book a 10!!
Rating:
Summary: slot this
Review: This book is phenomenal. Read it. Samuel R. Delany's influence is apparent in a lot of Gibson's writing (concepts, some style, etc.), but Gibson is his own writer. And an amazing writer, at that. His style is sleek and slick and graceful and gritty and shiny and polished and dirty all at the same time. It's a joy to read his prose. I saw a review on this board in which someone refers to Gibson's writing as "murky" and says that his story is confusing, or obscure. Well, that is part of the point of this novel. The characters are living in a confusing, fast-paced, data-soaked world, so why should you have an easy time understanding it? There's so much going on around them that *they* can barely keep track of it, so don't expect an easier time for yourself. And that is one of the best things about this story--it's mysterious, sometimes confusing, and great. I've read it 3 or 4 times by now, and although the plot has become much clearer to me, it still retains a sense of mystery and wonder that makes it one of my all-time favorites. P.S.--It's 1997, almost 1998: if you haven't read this book by now, then what are you waiting for?! How un-hip can you get? :-)
Rating:
Summary: Great! A marvellous and entrancing mindscape. Essential.
Review: This book, while lacking a certain literary sophistication and having a specks of distraction in the shaping of characters and plot, is a great scenario showcase. If I must referr -cliche- to Bladerunner, I must say that this too is a story in which the environment or scenario in which the plot develops continues to live for years after details of characters and storyline fade in one's memory. While I do not catalogue this book as a "forecast", I am willing to say that for those of us working in emergent fields such as AI or CAS this book contains a certain message that is hard not to remember every day. If you work with computers, or try to understand where they are taking us, read this book. You will enjoy and remember forever the vivid images Gibson paints with so much skill.
| 
