Review: Neuromancer

The one-handed economist

I read this 1984 book maybe 30 years ago, and I remember that it was a gripping sci-fi tale. I also knew that William Gibson more or less invented the “cyperpunk” genre with this book — his first!

I won’t describe the plot, which is quite twisty, or any big lessons learned (it’s fiction after all!), but I will repeat a few key passages here — passages whose impacts are still felt 41 years later:

1. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz [a bartender], though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
2. “The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.
3. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . .
4. Just thinking out loud… How smart’s an Al, Case?” “Depends. Some aren’t much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let ‘em get.” “Look, you’re a cowboy. How come you aren’t just flat-out fascinated with those things?” “Well,” he said, “for starts, they’re rare. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can’t crack the ice [protective program]. That’s where ice all comes from, you know? And then there’s the Turing cops [they keep AIs under control], and that’s bad heat.” He looked at her. “I dunno, it just isn’t part of the trip.
5. Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your Al’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the Al makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electro-magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

FIVE STARS.