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Average Customer Rating:

I'm sorry but...	Customer Rating:
I find Gibson pretty much unreadable. I really struggled to finish this book as I just don't care about any of the characters. His style of writing seems much better suited to short stories, and he is an absolute master at invocation of mood and setting. I just find anything longer than a few pages intensely stodgy. Go and get burning chrome instead and tackle it in short chunks...

Vague, rushed, poorly defined.

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This book suffers from an incoherent plot, ill-defined characters and a generally ineffective writing style. I Didn't manage to finish this, though i rarely give up on books. I got to about 2/3rds through and realised i neither knew who these characters were or had any interest in their fate. The internet has come to define our future as a race. Gibson has the honour of being the first Sci-fi writer to adress this fact extensively. This makes Neuromancer noteworthy but not a good piece of literature.

Visionary but spoiled by an incomprehensible style

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I was left with very mixed feelings about this book - Philip K Dick meets Quentin Tarantino. It was written in the early 1980's and is clearly creative, visionary and ahead of its time in the concepts and contents. Personally I think it has aged pretty well, and has proved to be prescient for concepts such as cyberspace and virtual reality. One can easily see how it has created the ideas found in The Matrix series. Why just 2-stars then? Well, unfortunately its echoes are found in the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, rather than the original film which was excellent. Like the two sequels this book slides into incomprehensibility. The virtual reality concepts are overwhelmed by the constant repetition of obscure jargon, and an extremely opaque and confusing writing style. The first section of the book opens in a Tokyo suburb and the constant overuse of Japanese terms quickly becomes annoying. Characters are quickly introduced, and just as quickly disappear, with some very messy action scenes and dialogue. I assume the writer is being deliberately obscure in narrating what is actually going on for some sort of effect. Rather than atmospheric, I quickly found this highly annoying. If anything the plot becomes increasingly opaque, and the motivation and allegiances of the characters remaining obscure. Despite the fact I actually read the book carefully, I think parts of the plot (such as the machinations of the Ashpool family and what actually transpired at the Villa Straylight) partially eluded me. However, by this point I'd stopped caring and just wanted to finish it. I'm glad I read it, because of its place in the Sci-Fi genre, but I'm certainly not tempted to reach for another Gibson. I can't help thinking this would have been better in the hands of a more competent writer, or at least one adopting a style designed to engage rather than completely baffle the reader!

Someone to Wachowski me

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I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along. On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through. But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!). There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story. Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was). Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us. Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience. They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements. Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary. Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk	Customer Rating:
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good... The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.