Neuromancer

Editorial review

Gibson's debut introduced the word 'cyberspace' and effectively founded cyberpunk as a genre. Forty years on, its imagery — corporate enclaves, jacked-in consciousness, mirrored sunglasses — is so absorbed into the culture that you might miss how original it once was.

AI-generated summary

Case, a washed-up data thief in a near-future Japan, is hired by a mysterious figure to pull off the impossible job: a heist inside cyberspace that will free a fragmentary AI from its constraints. The novel's plot is famously disorienting and famously worth the disorientation.

Key takeaways

• 1

  Corporations can become quasi-states; identity becomes a contested infrastructure.

• 2

  AI is approached most usefully as a question about agency, not just capability.

• 3

  Style is itself argument; cyberpunk's surfaces are part of its meaning.

• 4

  Genre fiction can do philosophy under cover.