William Gibson

When I began Neuromancer, I did not enjoy it. I’ve never been a big science fiction guy, and cyberpunk in particular has never drawn my interest. To me, Gibson’s style of “cutting out the clunk” left his work feeling disjointed and confusing; I could answer the question of what was going on, but I had no idea why. It was a style, format, and genre so wholly unfamiliar that I could make neither heads nor tails of it, and the prose’s shocking shade of purple didn’t help clarify anything.
It took me 264 pages to figure it out.

The general plot line is nothing new—gather the team, find the sword, slay the dragon—but it’s so much more than just that. Written, in a sense, as an epic poem that rivals Homer in breadth and Shakespeare in wordplay, Gibson’s Neuromancer is hard to put your fingers on—fitting for a construct of coded lattices and disembodied ones-and-zeroes. When you finally do manage to grasp what the intent is, the music catches and you see the whole matrix laid out before you: lines of code you can suddenly read and understand. Is it good? Sure, the same as anything is, if you look at ‘good’ in a certain neon light. But then, I’m a sucker for lonely endings.