Customer Reviews
I'm sorry but... - By: W. Rolls, 21 Nov 2008 
I find Gibson pretty much unreadable. I reallly struggled to finish this book as I just don't care about any of the characters. His style of writing seems much better suited to short stories, & he is an absolute master at invocation of mood & setting. I just find anything longer than a few pages intensely stodgy. Go & get burning chrome instead & tackle it in short chunks...
Vague, rushed, poorly defined. - By: Jon., 15 Nov 2008 
This book suffers from an incoherent plot, ill-defined characters & a generallly ineffective writing style.
I Didn't manage to finish this, though i rarely give up on books. I got to about 2/3rds through & realised i neither knew who these characters were or had any interest in their fate.
The internet has come to define our future as a race. Gibson has the honour of being the first Sci-fi writer to adress this fact extensively. This makes Neuromancer noteworthy but not a good piece of literature.
Visionary but spoiled by an incomprehensible style - By: John M, 03 Nov 2008 I was left with very mixed feelings about this book - Philip K Dick meets Quentin Tarantino. It was written in the early 1980's & is clearly creative, visionary & ahead of its time in the concepts & contents. Personallly I think it has aged pretty well, & has proved to be prescient for concepts such as cyberspace & virtual reality. One can easily see how it has created the ideas found in The Matrix series. Why just 2-stars then? Well, unfortunately its echoes are found in the Matrix Reloaded & Matrix Revolutions, rather than the original film which was excellent. Like the two sequels this book slides into incomprehensibility. The virtual reality concepts are overwhelmed by the constant repetition of obscure jargon, & an extremely opaque & confusing writing style. The first section of the book opens in a Tokyo suburb & the constant overuse of Japanese terms quickly becomes annoying. Characters are quickly introduced, & just as quickly disappear, with some very messy action scenes & dialogue. I assume the writer is being deliberately obscure in narrating what is actuallly going on for some sort of effect. Rather than atmospheric, I quickly found this highly annoying. If anything the plot becomes increasingly opaque, & the motivation & alllegiances of the characters remaining obscure. Despite the fact I actuallly read the book carefully, I think parts of the plot (such as the machinations of the Ashpool family & what actuallly transpired at the Villa Straylight) partiallly eluded me. However, by this point I'd stopped caring & just wanted to finish it. I'm glad I read it, because of its place in the Sci-Fi genre, but I'm certainly not tempted to reach for another Gibson.
I can't help thinking this would have been better in the hands of a more competent writer, or at least one adopting a style designed to engage rather than completely baffle the reader!
Someone to Wachowski me - By: Mr. O. Buxton, 30 Dec 2007 
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term & then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" & it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totallly swept along.
On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived & executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.
But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, & while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, & from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme & literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, & unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes alll this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).
There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initiallly forbidding, suddenly "clicks" & carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, & the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, & never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.
Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily & fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, & even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, & appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).
Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, & while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.
Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint & fairly pointless when the internet we do know & love is constructed for its infinite flexibility & re-orderability - the data is just there, & you the user can use what tools you like to order & navigate it to your convenience.
They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down & disentangle Gibson's contorted prose & plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, & the bits that are different are alll marked improvements.
Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, & on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.
Olly Buxton
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk - By: turner, 23 Oct 2007 
In there beginning the was case, & wintermute saw case & it was good...
The alpha & omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.
