Neuromancer

Anyone wanting to argue than Neuromancer has aged like either milk or wine will readily find all the examples they could want to make their case; but the depiction of the consensual hallucination in Neuromancer still reads like a more futuristic network and virtual reality technology than anything we have today.

The words visionary and iconic get thrown around by hypebeasts and idiots to the point they're a debased and inflated currency, but describing Neuromancer without them is telling lies of omission. Parts of Neuromancer still describe a vision of what may yet come (and a far from idealised vision at that).

For anyone who hasn't read it, expect it to make less sense on your first reading than the second. Some things seem overly detailed but on rereading the same ink on the same pages somehow has written different words leaving me a completely different impression second time around. I imagine well written murder mystery or noir genre works achieve, but I'm a philistine who hasn't read Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler so this is naked speculation on my part.

I don't think this would turn anyone who doesn't enjoy sci-fi or cyberpunk into a fan, but any who've enjoyed either I think it's a worth the read and re-read.

This book is truly a classic that I read in the 80's it has stood the test of time. It has only has gotten better as the layers of nostalgia that Gibson layered into the original read one way in the late 80's now read with an additional patina of nostalgia that makes them even sensuous, luxurious, and grotesque yet still with a word; Greater.

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”

“When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.”

“The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, 'in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. '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. ”