In the universe Gibson imagines, the most powerful beings are AIs (artificial intelligences). The novel’s plot turns, like much dystopian SF, on the deep-laid schemes of an almost but not quite omnipotent agency.
Case (forename redundant, like any good hard-boiled antihero) is a recognisable type purloined from detective fiction: hard-bitten, brave, apparently cynical but in fact humane. Henry Case is a computer hacker rescued from death by a shadowy organisation that needs his skills to break into the computer systems of another organisation. Neuromancer does have the rudiments of a traditional novel: a protagonist and a plot. Disoriented, as a result of the novel’s transformation of our very idea of physical space – a transformation that deeply influenced science fiction writers, and indeed film-makers, who followed Gibson. Perplexed, from being absorbed into some undateable future world governed by an advanced technology whose capacities have to be learned as one reads.
T he first-time reader of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, if unacquainted with any of Gibson’s other novels, is likely to be perplexed and disoriented.
