earth2travis
Dec 23rd, 2011 @ 1:52 am
Neuromancer
by William Gibson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I got a hold of this book as a wanna be hacker finishing up high school. It blew my mind not unlike other experiments I was frequently running at the time. Every few years I return to it when reconnecting with my cyberpunk roots. Set in a world of sprawl and decay the story follows an interface cowboy on a downward spiral. His demise was interrupted by a mission of unknown objectives. Led by a former Colonel called Armitage and accompanied by a razor girl mercenary named Molly, Case must hack his way into corporate artificial intelligence before the insurance policy of toxic sacs implanted in him expires.
The tale frantically takes you through worlds where lines between fantasy and reality no longer exist. Where silicon enhanced hipsters take hactivism to levels currently unthinkable. Where corporations have become immortal organisms. And artificial intelligences battle in an ongoing struggle between the hive mind and personality.
It is a seductive, thriller best experienced via Gibson’s visual poetry.
“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. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…”
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