Chiba City Greens | Illustration: James Bareham/MBH4H
I have a confession: Until I started working at The Verge in 2016, I’d never heard of Neuromancer.
I was, of course, familiar with many of Neuromancer’s themes: Cyberpunk and cyberspace, computer hacking, corporate espionage, cybernetic enhancements, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and near-future worlds populated with leather jacket-wearing murderous street punks. I just didn’t know how many of these modern science fiction tropes first appeared or became prominent in the pages of William Gibson’s book.
I recently decided to read it for the first time. My reasons were twofold: Firstly, I wanted to get my year of distraction off to a good start by avoiding as much social media as humanly possible. Secondly, I want to read a lot more hardback books, specifically science fiction hardback books, and have bought a series of titles to do just that: A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K.Dick; Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky; and The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. But first and foremost on my list was Neuromancer. I read it in a week.
Neuromancer IS cyberpunk. It’s a 3am neon-lit smoky dive bar cocktail of science fiction—a gritty, technology-fueled vision of a rain-soaked dystopian near future. For someone with even a passing knowledge of sci-fi from the last 40 years, it’s all astonishingly familiar even from the moment you read the opening line, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”
Gibson isn’t the originator of the word cyberpunk—that honor goes to American author Bruce Bethke, who first used it for the title of his 1983 short story—and the word never once appears with the pages of Neuromancer. Yet Gibson’s novel has arguably shaped the entire cyberpunk genre more than any other book.
If you’ve never read Neuromancer, you still know Neuromancer—even if you don’t know that you know it.
Chiba City Reds | Illustration: James Bareham/MBH4H
Despite its relatively short length by modern sci-fi standards, Neuromancer isn’t an easy read. Gibson introduces a lexicon of technological terms that I found visually jarring and don’t always make immediate sense—especially when describing the characters’ experience of cyberspace. Gibson’s tendency to splice seemingly random words together to form new ones (like the now obvious “cyber” and “space”) or repurpose existing terms in new ways (“slivers of Microsoft”—to be sure, Gibson is not describing Excel here) meant I often had to reread paragraphs, pages, or even entire chapters to grasp what was happening, particularly early on. However, there may be a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with Gibson’s writing style.
Back in my Verge days, I often used Lorem Gibson in feature layout mockups instead of the standard placeholder text, Lorem Ipsum. It felt fittingly Verge-y—a cyberpunk twist on meaningless, abstract design filler. Even though I hadn’t actually read any of his work at the time, I loved how Gibson’s words, stripped of any context, created a flow of abstract, tech-laden phrases. When I finally sat down to read Neuromancer, I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences. Don’t believe me? Read this:
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