Neuromancer by William Gibson

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. — first line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer

At the beginning, Case, our cyber-cowboy, has found himself at a dead end. His betrayal of a client caused him to no longer be able to jack into the ‘matrix’, a cyberspace — in fact, probably the first time that cyberspace or a world inside the bits and bytes of a computer has been mentioned. Later, the terms would become familiar to anyone with a computer and who has a Keanu Reeves fetish.

The very first time we see Case, he’s drinking at a bar, a suicidal middleman between people who have things (dope, in this case, more often than not) and the people who have the money to buy said things.

By the end of chapter one, we’ve started the story — Case meets Molly who introduces him to a man named Armitage who wants him to break into a highly protected AI (yes, Artificial Intelligence). His payment? To be cured and able to jack in again.

Then you’re left in William Gibson’s capable hands taking you on a beautiful whirlwind adventure into the future and one man’s idea of what a ‘cyberspace’ would look like.

This was the first real science fiction book I have ever read. I tend to be a fairly fast reader, but this book was a bit more dense than what I’ve been used to in the past. When you’re not used to drawing certain pictures and images in your mind, I think it can be difficult to invest yourself in another genre. You have to take your time putting your story pieces together, instead of being given the same old city streets where your only real need is to know what the characters were doing.

For a while, it was an easy book to put down. I had a difficult time becoming invested in the characters and the storyline until my husband came up to me and said, “So have you found out who Case is working for yet?”

Then I learned to slow down my reading and gather all the information before I drew the picture in my head. I learned to savor William Gibson’s prose. His prose in Neuromancer is absolutely some of the most beautiful description I have read in a book. Everything — and I mean, everything — added, not only to the description of the setting of the book, but it also added to the futuristic feel of the story.

There are so many snake-oil salesmen out there on the Internet who are always trying to teach us to read faster, to learn faster — speed reading is one course I’ve seen. With Neuromancer and other books like this, I don’t want to speed read through it. I don’t want to read it in a day — even though if it had been a mystery, suspense, or thriller, I probably could have.

This is one of those books that I’m going to put into my TBR list to read again and this next time, perhaps I will get more out of it. We’ll have to see.