Really, it's high time that I read this book. I've read Gibson, of course, and bits and pieces of his fellow so-called 'cyberpunk' writers, along with a fair chunk of the academic commentary that has sprung up discussing the movement (I'm just now browsing through my old "Postmodernism" reader), but somehow I never got around to reading the book usually said to have been the key work in establishing it all - Neuromancer.
Happily, Neuromancer isn't in any sense a disappointment. Having read so much about it beforehand, and already being so aware of the key elements in its conceptual map/vocabulary - the invention of the concepts of 'cyberspace' and 'the matrix' and their concomitant 'consensual hallucination' (metaphors which would, of course, later be instantiated 'IRL' via the virtual reality and the increasingly all-pervasive internet), and the manner in which Gibson imagines this framework in order to visualise the inescapable mediation of reality in technological society, the decentring of the subject, and the problematisation of the human/machine distinction (cyborgs etc) - and having seen how these ideas have been taken up in mainstream pop culture, it would've been difficult for me to come to this book 'afresh', but of course that wouldn't have been the point anyway.
In any case, though, Neuromancer somehow still feels fresh and cool. While it's astonishingly and undeniably visionary, the novel is still fundamentally plot-driven, and it moves rapidly and punchily through its hyper-real kaleidoscope-landscape of images and surfaces with the anti-heroic (at best) Case always at its centre; and the characters, such as they are, are psychologically plausible given their starting points, in exactly the same way that this affectless, junkyard-mess of a world, is plausible given its starting points (indeed, the natures of the 'characters' follow inescapably from the nature of the world imagined by Gibson). Today - as, presumably, when it was first released - Neuromancer is exciting to read not only because of the head-spinning imagery, constant surge of ideas, and invention of a whole new way of understanding the world, but because it's a damn good story - colourful, fast-moving, action-filled and vivid.
