Book Review: Neuromancer by William Gibson

I really enjoyed the read - would definitely recommend this to any fan of the cyberpunk culture/aesthetic. Apparently, this book was one of the first to contain such cyberpunk themes. The terms Night City and "eddies" definitely reminded me of the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. That was probably one of my first encounters with the cyberpunk aesthetic - I really-really enjoyed the game. Especially driving my car around and enjoying the cityscape of Night City. I played it to the end, however, I never got quite over the fact that as a female character I was not able to romance Panam. But still, it really got me to enjoy the aesthetic and the looks of it all. When reading the book, I imagined a lot of the things to look like something out of Cyberpunk 2077.

I have to clarify, though - the Night City of "Neuromancer" is way different from the Night City of "Cyberpunk 2077" - the game is not based on the book as one might guess at first. "Neuromancer" was written in 1984 and it has aged well, especially for a science fiction novel. It is packed with references which can make the book a bit hard to read - however, there are explanations available on the Internet. I was also get my hands on an Estonian version of the book - "Neuromant", which was not translated very well, however, it had explanations of all the terms at the very back, which helped me to understand the context (I decided to read an e-book in English, instead).

Thus, this book took me quite a bit of time to finish - this is not the type of easy science-fiction read one might imagine. I definitely had to have some patience for myself, as I am used to "swallowing" a book in a day or less. This one took me around a week.

Although not an easy read, Gibson is great as an author - the book is packed full of action. It revolves mostly around character dialogue and actions, less on thoughts or feelings. It almost seems like there is little time to feel, when the main character Case (a "cyberspace cowboy") is kidnapped and brought to Armitage - a man who wants to use Case for his missions. 

He also does not use very specific or hard to understand words for the description of the cyber space. A lot of it is left to the reader to imagine.