Written by Charlotte Maidment
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”. William Gibson’s Neuromancer kick-started the cyberpunk genre. This isn’t just a book review; this is an homage to the founding father of cyberpunk. If you’ve ever enjoyed The Matrix, Altered Carbon, or any story with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and technology implanted into the body… William Gibson’s Neuromancer is the one to thank.
Cyberpunk Origins
Before diving into my review, let’s outline the cyberpunk genre. The clue is in the name: cybernetics and advanced, speculative technologies meet a punk attitude that has a blatant disregard of rules, authority, and the law. Cyberpunk is a heavily stylised genre that draws upon the aesthetics of punk culture with advanced speculative technology, advanced plastic surgery, and body modifications… all while critiquing capitalism and geopolitics. Cyberpunk clashes the struggles of the exploited working-class against the experiences of the top one percent.
Plot
It is worth noting that Neuromancer contains references to drug addiction, violence, injury, and sexual assault that may be disturbing to some readers. Proceed with caution if these topics are potential triggers.
Henry Dorsett Case is a hacker. In his former employment, he was a “console cowboy”, able to traverse virtual reality… that is, until his employers catch him stealing and attack him with a chemical agent that leaves him unable to access the matrix. Case is living in poverty until a new employer approaches him and offers him a place in a heist. In exchange, Case’s nerves will be prepared – but at the same time, his body is implanted with sacs of poison. If Case fails the heist, or attempts to run away, he will die.
Neuromancer is complicated and I highly recommend taking the time to re-read it at least once. There are also many, many essays online and in print that delve deeper into the world of the Sprawl. Engaging in depth with Gibson’s work will also make cyberpunk elements more noticeable in all the science-fiction you encounter.
Characters
Case is, in my opinion, the least interesting character in Neuromancer. It is the side characters where Neuromancer truly comes into its own. First, Molly; a bodyguard with cat-like claws and silver “mirrorshades” embedded across her eyes. She inspired my undergraduate literature dissertation and after Neuromancer’s publication became a building block for many science-fiction love interests – most notably, Matrix’s Trinity.
Next, Lady 3Jane. She is a rich and powerful heiress to the Tessier-Ashpool corporation family. Their generations are maintained through cloning and cryogenic sleep. She has a warped attachment to her family because she is the third clone of “Jane”.
The list of varied and creative side characters continues with Armitage (a shadowy ex-military man), Dixie Flatline (a consciousness trapped in the matrix), and the twin artificial intelligences (Neuromancer and Wintermute) who wish to merge.
Overall
I am rating Gibson’s Neuromancer as an eight out of ten. I have a huge amount of respect for Gibson’s work, but I want to address that as a novel published in 1984, it is very much a product of its time. My undergraduate dissertation was an in-depth investigation of how cyberpunk writers like Gibson write their female characters. The majority of male cyberpunk writers put women in positions where they must either be rescued, sexualised, or both and Gibson is not exempt from this.
Molly is often hailed by academics as a powerful, progressive feminist character and while she may have been revolutionary at the time of publication, literature has evolved beyond idolising Molly Millions. Her power in Neuromancer comes from her masculine “coding”, i.e. she is written with overwhelming masculine attributes. This goes from dressing in clothing that accentuates her masculinity to the modification made to her eyes; her tear ducts are sealed, so instead of crying, she spits. Molly Millions is, unfortunately, too far into the “strong female protagonist” trope which implies women are only strong when they give up their femininity in order to take on masculine traits. At the same time, Case takes on feminine coding, and is subsequently portrayed as “weak”; he is the one behind the scenes, not driving the action. The portrayal of Case and Molly maintains a binary where femininity is weak and masculinity is strong.
However; my criticism of Neuromancer’s portrayal of femininity doesn’t intend to undermine how important the novel is to science-fiction and mainstream pop-culture. I thoroughly enjoy Neuromancer every time I pick it up, and Gibson’s creativity is truly inspirational. Gibson invented the concept of the matrix over ten years before the World Wide Web went live. He imagined virtual reality, artificial intelligence that behaved like humans, and globalisation on a scale that did not yet exist. Science, in many ways, has learnt from Neuromancer… and I think that makes it an incredible work of literature.
Neuromancer is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore!
Have you read Neuromancer? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Hotwired to the leading edges of art and technology, Neuromancer is a cyberpunk, science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.
The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus-hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace…
Henry Dorsett Case was the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.
The winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.
