"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, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for clinic tanks."
Cyberpunk is one of my great passions — I'm a little obsessed with the way it uses the contrast of low life and high tech to comment on slow decay of a society into each man for himself. In many ways, major cyberpunk works of the 80s and 90s are now outdated: technology never quite reached the heights it was predicted to. We never got hoverboards — instead we have sweltering summers and an incessant stream of Slack notifications. But thematically, these books and films are terrifyingly accurate: our world is overrun with billionaires that hide away in shimmering skyscrapers tucked behind too many LED billboards, advertising to the already-stretched-thin working class that run the streets that have been left to rot by our useless governments. How are we as a species excelling yet floundering like this?
I desperately wanted to like Neuromancer. It's been billed as the cyberpunk text, and Gibson coined many of the terms we still today associate with techy science fiction, like 'matrix', 'jacking in', even 'cyberspace' itself. But Neuromancer was off to a rough start with unambiguous misogyny and orientalism, in long, uncomfortable passages of cringe-worthy sex with Molly Millions, who is by far one of the most interesting characters of the novel, but to me never manages to quite shake off Gibson's pesky male gaze, and descriptions of settings like Chiba where protagonist Case eats yakitori and lusts after some shuriken. I don't know if my experience of Neuromancer was tainted by cyberpunk works that came out after which emulated Gibson's vision, which I'm sure was groundbreaking at the time, but in short, it's boring. I was bored.
I honestly thought I was going to DNF this (and that's not something I do frequently). Gibson's writing in the novel is filled to the brim with technobabble, and while I appreciate his innovation in solidifying cyberpunk as a genre for the West, I don't think having to refer to Wikipedia to confirm what exactly is happening makes for an enjoyable reading experience. The novel did get better in the second half, when the plot got on with it. There were definitely some interesting concepts, such as the Turing Police, but too many that felt half-baked and difficult to wrap my head around, like the matrix, as though Gibson wanted to create this neon world and make it unique a little too desparately.
I don't know if Gibson wrote this for any other audience than an adolescent male one. If you're looking for a good cyberpunk work, I wouldn't recommend this one — try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Akira instead.