Neuromancer

Neuromancer, novel (1984) by William Gibson that launched the cyberpunk movement within the science fiction literary genre. The novel, a fast-paced, gritty, Raymond Chandler-esque meditation on a computing-fueled dystopia of the near future, had an impact on many of its readers much like that of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on the hipster-bohemian counterculture of the 1950s and ’60s.

Plot

Neuromancer follows its protagonist Case, an unemployed computer hacker who is hired by a mysterious new employer called Armitage. He’s teamed with Molly, a cyborg, and Peter Riviera, a thief and illusionist, to carry out a series of crimes that set the stage for the group’s ultimate purpose, which is played out on the orbiting space station called Freeside, home of the wealthy Tessier-Ashpool family. The family has created two artificial intelligences (AIs), Wintermute and Neuromancer, that are so powerful that they can only be connected at a single point. Case and his cohorts learn that they had been hired by Wintermute to break the separation between the AIs. Case and Molly overcome the interference of cybernetic law enforcement and an attempted double-cross by Riviera to merge Wintermute with Neuromancer, and the novel ends with Case living in a brave new world wherein the merged AIs possess nearly limitless power.

Cultural impact

Just as Kerouac did not invent “beat” writing, Gibson did not create cyberpunk. Known simply as “the Movement,” cyberpunk had been bubbling for perhaps five years prior to Neuromancer’s publication, and in fact Gibson had made several important previous contributions to the sub-genre with such short stories as “Johnny Mnemonic” and “The Gernsback Continuum.” However, Neuromancer established the movement’s enduring face and provided its true founding text. The book established the filthy setting of an environmentally damaged, alienated, dystopian society dominated by global computer networks in which characters battle “artificial intelligences, monopoly capitalism and a world culture as ethnically eclectic as it is politically apathetic and alienated,” in the words of Webster’s New World Dictionary of Computer Terms. Gibson’s characters, like Kerouac’s, are fringe lowlifes, drug-ingesting antiheroes, and outlaws. They are also innately brilliant hackers who undertake insane adventures in the virtual reality of “cyberspace”—a word that Gibson had coined earlier and fleshed out in Neuromancer and that has since become a mainstream pseudonym for the Internet.

Gibson wrote Neuromancer at a time when the personal computer was just beginning to make inroads in private homes; famously, he wrote the book on an antiquated 1937 Hermes manual portable typewriter and bought a computer only after the royalties from Neuromancer began rolling in. In 1984 the Internet had only recently acquired its name as a generic pseudonym for the recently divided ARPANET system, and it had healthy competition from other computing networks like BITNET and USENET. Most people were blissfully unaware of the potential of networked computing. For 1984, Gibson’s book was ambitiously prophetic, leapfrogging beyond any notion of a text- and-image-based World Wide Web and directly into a computerized virtual reality into which hackers could “jack” themselves using body implants and cables, injecting their brains directly into “the Matrix.”

Gibson also made what was then a radical literary choice, creating in Neuromancer a near-future world permeated internally and externally by technologies that were already in existence in 1984, even if many were not fully developed then (or today). Gibson did not bother to warn his readers to avoid the terrifying place that we may be heading as a society, but instead showed the far side of cultural space that we already inhabit.