Neuromancer

Anyone wanting to argue than Neuromancer has aged like either milk or wine will readily find all the examples they could want to make their case; but the depiction of the consensual hallucination in Neuromancer still reads like a more futuristic network and virtual reality technology than anything we have today.

The words visionary and iconic get thrown around by hypebeasts and idiots to the point they're a debased and inflated currency, but describing Neuromancer without them is telling lies of omission. Parts of Neuromancer still describe a vision of what may yet come (and a far from idealised vision at that).

For anyone who hasn't read it, expect it to make less sense on your first reading than the second. Some things seem overly detailed but on rereading the same ink on the same pages somehow has written different words leaving me a completely different impression second time around. I imagine well written murder mystery or noir genre works achieve, but I'm a philistine who hasn't read Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler so this is naked speculation on my part.

I don't think this would turn anyone who doesn't enjoy sci-fi or cyberpunk into a fan, but any who've enjoyed either I think it's a worth the read and re-read.

So very tough to rate this book, as I suppose it's tough with everything that you consider a classic. Neuromancer is -the- classic cyberpunk novel. When I read this I had flashbacks of playing Shadowrun and reading Shadowrun novels. I had no idea how closely the RPG really stuck with this world of deckers who fight ICE in the matrix. Its influence is outstanding.

The story itself is not that easy to read, not always captivating. Our protagonist is Case, a drug addict and former hacker who had the ability to access cyberspace removed when he tried to cheat his former boss. He's now a substance-abusing wreck living in Japan who does criminal jobs. A street samurai called Molly locates him and offers him a job working for an ex-military guy in a mysterious hacking project. If he joined the team, he'd get his cyberspace access back. Case joins and eventually ends up in Freeside, a space habitat for the rich, where the powerful Tessier-Ashpool dynasty resides. Their job is to infiltrate the residence.

Case is not exactly an easy protagonist to care for, and I was far more interested in Molly, the razor girl, than Case. The build-up to the showdown in Freeside is slow but once events get rolling, it is hard to put the book down. But there are also stretches that were unbelievably boring or confusing.

Anyone interested in cyberpunk should probably read the book that established the genre, but don't expect it to be a super-smooth read these days.