Imagine, if you will, a world where people can spend all their time in an artificial construct of networked computers. Woah.
OK, so this is one of those science fiction books you have to allow yourself to travel back in time in order to appreciate. Before Cyberpunk was a thing. Before the Matrix movies. Before people thought long, black trench coats were cool. If you can get in that frame of mind, this story is pretty amazing.
Neuromancer is good on it's own grounds. Taken as simply a story, which ultimately is how all novels should be taken, it's a lot of fun. Full of mystery and crazy plot twists and so forth- like you'd expect from one of the seminal science fiction works. But taken as a historical artifact, the book becomes far more interesting.
Here is the question: Do you know what cyberspace is? Yes, you probably do. Does it match this definition by any chance?
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 banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
It's a bit wordy, but yeah. That's what cyberspace is. At least, that's what cyberspace is at it's coolest, most romantic notion.
Much has been written on the influence of this book. I didn't give this book all the attention it probably deserved as I read it mostly in the days just before and after my son was born, but even with that light read I couldn't help but see influence from this book everywhere. Online games, the Anonymous Collective, social networking, how people communicate on the internet- most online interactions seem to stem, partially, from a foundation built on this work.
That makes sense to me. Jack Womack wrote an amazing post-script to the book where he explains what he thinks happens. His theory is that the computing pioneers of the 1980s read Neuromancer and thought it was completely awesome. They then incorporated the style, language and concepts of the novel into the mortar of cyberspace.
If the point of art is to change the world then Neuromancer is completely successful.
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