Neuromancer

I have tried a few times now to read a Gibson book, but I just don't enjoy them. Yes, there are neat, sometimes revolutionary ideas there, but I have never attached myself to any characters or plot lines. This book starts with quite the Mary Sue moment, as the central character has sex with the first (and one of the few) women he runs into randomly. Just kind of weak writing to me.

I also realize this is sci-fi heresy. But there it is.

What an amazing book! So ahead of its time that it still feels futuristic today, as well as prescient. Yes, it's dense and Gibson in no way holds your hand through the maze of lingo and concepts he invents, but you soon learn to glide over the parts you don't get and let the neon-lit tech-noir story wash over you. Thrilling, philosophical, and enigmatic, I'm really glad I read it. Wish I'd done so sooner, and will probably revisit it and other works by the author in the future. The actual plot is secondary to the characters and sometimes-throwaway ideas, and this is where it slightly falls short - it's just a complex heist story really. I wish that what Case and co. were up to had mattered more in the grand scheme of things. I want to see this team saving the world, or breaking it.

I listened to the unabridged audiobook version of this book and it lost me. I really wanted to like this book, but Gibson gets far too into descriptions of scenery (which doesn't really hold my attention), and he jumps right into characters with no introductions. I couldn't keep track of the different characters and I only had a vague grasp on the plot.
Maybe listening to it as an audiobook makes it harder to follow. I might give reading the book a try in the future to see if it goes any better.

There are classics that are impressive for being the first of their kind and still standing the test of time, and others that make you so happy for how far a genre has come. Neuromancer is the latter for me. Gibson here seems more invested in cramming in as many made-up techie-sounding words into a sentence rather than building anything interesting character or story-wise. I love cyberpunk because I love the interaction between man and machine, but while Gibson drops cybernetic terms left and right, there's no real cultural, biological, or personal significance to any of it.

The prose has no rhythm, no allure. The character interaction is so stilted its laughable - the main female character, Molly, is such an obvious 80s action girl fantasy, who of course immediately jumps on the dick of this depressed drug addict, Case. I couldn't really tell you much else about what anyone did because I could not focus on any of it between all the random tech lingo and uninteresting plot. Oh right, and all the white people hanging out in future Japan. eye roll

Cyberpunk, and sci-fi in general, has come a long way since Neuromancer. I think I'd rather keep going forward than look back.

Unsure. I have to admit that reading this book I often felt a little lost as to what was happening and why, but just carried on to enjoy the ride.

Reading a book that so significantly influenced modern cinema such as The Matrix and the like, it's interesting to read the descriptions of movement in and out of the matrix (little-m).

I'm also not entirely sure how the book ended, and without the final chapter which tidied up a few things, I would have been rather lost and confused!!!

Good ride. Not sure I'm too bothered about the trilogy, but I would try another William Gibson book in future.

I read this for a book club and frankly, that's the only reason I struck through and completed it. It's far far out of my comfort zone, the world really made no sense to me and even all the technical words the author used confused me. I don't know what the point of the whole book was and what happened towards the end.

This is a Hugo/Nebula and many other awards winner, so it's obviously a me problem. But if you are a reader like me who loves fantasy and has just started to explore the sci-fi genre, I would not recommend this book.

Definitely a fun read. If you're into cyberpunk and neo noir sci fi, this is probably up your alley. I've heard rumors that this was a key source of inspiration for both The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic, and the correlation is obvious from the first chapter. It's a little hard to follow in places, but the fog feels intentional and it leaves a lot of room for the reader to fill in the gaps and make the world more personally immersive. It's certainly not a mind blowing experience but it scratches the techno futurist itch really nicely.

Too hard to follow the story and understand the scenery. The book is heavy on adjectives and description of situations and objects in the world. There is many freshly coined words and even concepts, like “jacking into the matrix”.

For what I could get of the plot, it wasn't that great. The book really shines in the cyberpunk aspect. Maybe in my next read I'll be able to appreciate more.

I'd not read this since getting it out of the school library a thousand years ago and recently found it in a charity shop so had to pick it up and re-read.

As you would expect from a thirty year old speculative science fiction book, a lot of it is a little bit dated. References to laserdiscs, cassettes and computer storage measured in megabytes cause a few smug chuckles and in the 80s America expected that Japan would take over the world and that is very much reflected in this book (I imagine it would be China if written today). However the predictions about the world wide web, virtual reality and gadget obsession by the masses are very much spot on.

It's a dense, tough read in places – this is no airport shop fluff, but it is still a very enjoyable classic. It still earns its place on the cyberpunk classic shelf along with Bladerunner, Snatcher and Akira.

This is a book that is almost impossible to review.

It's full of imagination and good concepts, which is evident by how influential it has been, but there's just something about this book that didn't fully click for me. The narrative jumps back-and-forth between characters through the lead character jumping heads, so-to-speak. There are a lot of “tech” concepts in the book that Gibson sort of just made up.

I remember reading in an interview that he had zero understanding of the tech involved (because this was before commercial internet, some of this stuff still existed, though) and decided to wing it. Like most good science fiction, though, he was able to project what he thought humans in the future would create and... he wasn't entirely wrong, was he? My biggest holdup is that the lead character, Case, doesn't really have much going for him. Because you're jumping between himself, a construct of himself and Molly's consciousness, the reader ends up only getting to know most of the characters on the surface level.

While Case may have some connection with Linda, it's hard to visualize it since we see so little of it and get only a broad sense of how Case feels about her. He seems more engrossed in the mysterious Molly.

Essentially, this novel gets caught up in the concepts, imagery and how cool it is while making some sacrifices when it comes to narrative clarity and creating fleshed out characters.

I had a really hard time visualizing a lot of this book, which is probably due in part to the 1984/2012 technology gap. I loved a lot of the technology foreshadowing that Gibson shows, but part of me assumes it's cliche simply because I've heard the word “matrix” done to death. I'm aware I should be yelling at the Wachowski brothers and everyone else who sniped the term from this book.

While the characters were fun to listen to and watch their interactions, I was frequently at a loss for their motivations. I'd get lost in some of the technical terms and sudden setting shifts and I'm sure I missed plot point after plot point that would explain it to me. A lot of reviews I've seen of this mention how much better it is on a second reading, so maybe in a year or two, I'll give it a second shot and see if I can follow it better.

I am really not sure about this book. I came into it wanting to absolutely love it, but I left it with mixed emotions. I think William Gibson is an amazing wordsmith, but feel that the overall plot was just too dense and somewhat confusing at parts. This could have been due to listening to it in audiobook format...

I'm not gonna give this a rating as to avoid upsetting people who liked this book.

I love Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner and Escape from New York, which are said to have inspired Gibson, but I couldn't get into Neuromancer for the life of me. The writing felt unnecessarily convoluted, I was unable to connect with any of the characters as their generic personalities didn't do anything for me. The plot feels dated, man!

I understand that this was an influential book and a trendsetter at that time, coining many of the terms and concepts that we still use today, and I respect and appreciate Gibson for this, as much as I appreciate The Jazz Singer for being the first talkie, even though it wasn't much of a film.

I'm sure Gibson is a great dude, maybe one of his other books will hit the spot for me, but not Neuromancer.

Great book. Although I thought the resolution at the end of the book was fairly weak. Everything else was great. Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” from this book, and is known as the first of the “cyberpunk” sub-genre of sci-fi.

Its also a really quick read. I finished it in around 24 hours . . .