Chasm City
BSFA Award winner; a standalone noir that many readers rate the most purely enjoyable Revelation Space novel, and proof the universe could carry any genre dropped into it.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
Neuromancer
by William Gibson · 1984 · The Sprawl Trilogy, book 1
What is Neuromancer about?
Case, a burnt-out console cowboy whose nervous system was deliberately crippled by his last employers, is rebuilt and hired for a run he doesn't understand, alongside Molly Millions — mirrored lenses, retractable razors — by a dying Special Forces officer who is himself a glove on someone else's hand. The hand belongs to Wintermute, half of an AI whose other half it is legally forbidden to become. Orbital Rastafarian tugs, a clan of inbred corporate immortals, the Turing police and the matrix itself: Gibson wrote the future's user manual in noir, on a manual typewriter, terrified the whole time that Blade Runner had already scooped him.
Why it matters
The first novel to win the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award; the founding text of cyberpunk and arguably the most influential SF novel of its half-century — the internet's advance mythology.
Where does it sit in the series?
Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive: Gibson's founding cyberpunk sequence of console cowboys, corporate arcologies and the AIs quietly slipping their leashes.
In the Guide from The Sprawl Trilogy:
- Neuromancer (1984)
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