Neuromancer, William Gibson

5 stars

First Sentence: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Thoughts: Case was once a hotshot cyber-cowboy, able to jack into the Matrix and steal data from anyone, anywhere. Then he got greedy and his bosses burnt him out so he couldn’t connect to the Matrix anymore. Now he lives in Chiba City dealing (and doing) drugs and selling contraband on the street. Then he noticed a weird woman with silver eyes who kept following him wherever he went. He thought he got away until he went back to his coffin room. She was waiting for him there. She introduced herself as Molly and told him her boss, Armitage, wanted to meet him.

Armitage gave Case an offer he couldn’t refuse: surgery to rebuild his shattered nervous system so he could jack in again. Oh, and to replace his pancreas since it was shot from all the drugs he was taking. Once he recovered, Case would repay him by running the greatest heist of all time: liberating an AI from corporate captivity.

Molly and Case build up a team in the real world and the Matrix from their former friends and colleagues. They traveled around the globe and into space, running minor heists in both worlds until they were ready for the final job at the home of the Tessier-Ashpools who run the corporation keeping the AI prisoner. Then Wintermute, the AI, got involved itself.

It’s a fun sci-fi adventure that has aged both well and poorly. Gibson mentioned in the introduction that the lack of cell phones was a major flaw, especially since pay phones play a key role in a couple of crucial scenes. But who could have predicted smartphones in 1984? In the world of the novel, the pay phones make sense. It’s not “now,” but a fictional “now” based in the early 1980s. Gibson is not Nostradamus. Of course, Nostradamus wasn’t Nostradamus either, so there’s that. In any case, the novel is also a warning about relying too much on technology. Maybe, by the time we have AI like in the book, we won’t have destroyed the natural world so that the skies are still blue instead of staticky.