Funnily enough Neuromancer is one of the novels I've found that non-SF folk actually quite like. Possibly because it borrows from some of the film-noir tropes and is written in a more "literary" style than much SF. But I'm a huge Gibson fan so may well be biased :-)
A couple of things to bear in mind when reading it.
First Neuromancer was published in 1984. It was the novel that pretty much invented the whole cowboy-hacker image that's been reused a bazzilion times since. The whole idea of "cyberspace" the "matrix". Of custom hacker tools. Super-human AIs with less than human motivations. Of an international data-sphere used by companies. The rise of the global multi-national. The magical influence of the 1% of the 1% superrich. All of it in a much more "gritty" realistic world. Neither dystopian or utopian.
So much of this is just the general background to the whole SF genre now. Or indeed reality.
Just as a book of ideas it just blew me away at the time I first read it in 1989. Five years after it was first published. When most of the world had no clue what e-mail or the internet was. When my neighbour thought the AI in my degree was "Artificial Insemination" not "Artificial Intelligence" (that was a really confusing and funny conversation - "I never knew you were interested in farming" :-)
Second was how it compared to the rest of SF at the time. The kind of fiction folk like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley were putting out was just so... different from most of the SF that was out there at the time. Gibson's was the first novel length work I'd read in that style and... wow... it just blew me away.
Don't get me wrong - I love Ender's game too. In the same way I can love "Of Mice and Men" and "Moby Dick" - despite there radically different literary styles.
It's hard for me to divorce Neuromancer from the time I read it in. If I'd grown up reading Charlie Stross, Neal Asher and Richard Morgan then I'm sure that it would feel vastly less original. But for me, anyway, its a book I still love.
A couple of things to bear in mind when reading it.
First Neuromancer was published in 1984. It was the novel that pretty much invented the whole cowboy-hacker image that's been reused a bazzilion times since. The whole idea of "cyberspace" the "matrix". Of custom hacker tools. Super-human AIs with less than human motivations. Of an international data-sphere used by companies. The rise of the global multi-national. The magical influence of the 1% of the 1% superrich. All of it in a much more "gritty" realistic world. Neither dystopian or utopian.
So much of this is just the general background to the whole SF genre now. Or indeed reality.
Just as a book of ideas it just blew me away at the time I first read it in 1989. Five years after it was first published. When most of the world had no clue what e-mail or the internet was. When my neighbour thought the AI in my degree was "Artificial Insemination" not "Artificial Intelligence" (that was a really confusing and funny conversation - "I never knew you were interested in farming" :-)
Second was how it compared to the rest of SF at the time. The kind of fiction folk like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley were putting out was just so... different from most of the SF that was out there at the time. Gibson's was the first novel length work I'd read in that style and... wow... it just blew me away.
Don't get me wrong - I love Ender's game too. In the same way I can love "Of Mice and Men" and "Moby Dick" - despite there radically different literary styles.
It's hard for me to divorce Neuromancer from the time I read it in. If I'd grown up reading Charlie Stross, Neal Asher and Richard Morgan then I'm sure that it would feel vastly less original. But for me, anyway, its a book I still love.