How many pages is neuromancer

Now, for the first time, Ace Books is proud to present this groundbreaking literary achievement in a trade paperback edition. Gibson has that in common with Le Guin and with J. Neuromancer sings to us as a collage of voices, a mixed chorus, some trustworthy and others malicious, some piped through masks.

Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. Add to Bookshelf. Read An Excerpt. Jul 01, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Audiobook Download.

Paperback —. About Neuromancer Neuromancer is the multiple award-winning novel that launched the astonishing career of William Gibson. Also in Sprawl Trilogy. Also by William Gibson. See all books by William Gibson. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Snow Crash. Neal Stephenson. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. The Peripheral. William Gibson. Red Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson. Stranger in a Strange Land. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Neuromancer Sprawl, 1. This is a wild ride. If you like Philip K. William Gibson said that while writing Neuromancer he went to see the Ridley Scott film Bladerunner and thought that his ideas for the book were hopelessly lost, that everyo Wow.

William Gibson said that while writing Neuromancer he went to see the Ridley Scott film Bladerunner and thought that his ideas for the book were hopelessly lost, that everyone would naturally assume that he had taken all of his queues from the film. I have written that Bladerunner was that most rare of accomplishments, a film that was as good or better than the book.

Neuromancer has been called the definitive, benchmark novel of the cyberpunk sub-genre. Dick, among others, but then goes to a wholly different level. It can even be said that Gibson, who in turn heavily influenced the producers of The Matrix, is a bridge between the older 60s post-modernist dystopian science fiction with the more modern, computer driven, angst ridden world weariness that has represented artists since the 80s.

Neuromancer defined the genre and I could hardly go a few pages without noticing how it had influenced literature and film since. As a book, this was excellent, I could not put it down.

Gibson is the literary successor to Phillip K. Dick, an observer who does not skip ahead to a distant dystopian rebirth, but instead chronicles the ugly fall itself. Of these I have listed six as being my all-time favorites. After thinking about Neuromancer for years and having just re-read it, almost literally not putting it down, I am adding this to my very short list of beloved books. The PKD allusions are still there as is the Bosch-esque attention to detail — this is a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and ideas coming at you at ludicrous speed.

There are also the references to Bladerunner and Escape from New York and this makes me think of the shared consciousness and Jungian gestalt cultural observations that Gibson was tapping into in the early eighties.

What was going on in this time that made such talented artists as Ridley Scott and John Carpenter also envision such a world? Gibson was jacked into a time and space phenomena that was just below the subconscious and so struck a chord with so many.

But it is also a timeless speculative fiction novel in the sense that it depicts human isolation and technological alienation that Yevgeny Zamyatin and E. Forster wrote about decades before. A must read. View all 44 comments. I recently decided to pick up a copy and read it. I figured wrong. It jumps from local to local and situation to situation in a very jerky way. Gibson utterly fails at making any of the characters or settings come to life.

The violence is slightly more exciting than the sex. He has no passion, even when his ability to plug into the matrix is restored. View all 57 comments. I've had a wondrous epiphany! I finally get it I have seen the light and understanding has dawned. To begin I came to it after having read several of its prolific spawn and decided it was time to visit the source code. My first mistake I viewed the novel within the narrow confines of the world that it had created and completely missed its true magic.

I saw the novel through the fog of my faulty preconceptions. I saw this as a novel for the cyberspacially erudite, and those not coded for the new paradigm were to be left behind in the trash heap of history along with the abacus and the printed word. For those who have had a similar reaction to this book, you It missed the point entirely.

William Gibson was more techno-stupid than techno-proficient and his interpretation of the interpretation of the future was the vision of an artist not an engineer. In fact, the few areas where Gibson had any knowledge about what he was writing are the areas that have become the most anachronistic.

What Gibson did see Increased dependance on technology, increased detachment among individuals and a blurring of lines between nations. And all of this led to that central, crystalizing vision of cyberspace, artificial intelligence and the world wide web.

WOW, sorry for waxing on so long, but like I said, I am the newly converted. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. Since his involuntary exile from the matrix, Case has become self-destructive and suicidal and is hell bent on shuffling off this mortal coil but is unwilling or unable to accomplish the task himself.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void… The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy.

Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. That is the "hero" of our little tale. That is really the basic set up though it gives you less than a hint of the real flavor of the book. That is really a bare bones description of the plot, but there are so many well crafted summaries floating around that I wanted to stick mainly with commentary.

It's personal, internal and emotional, not cold and externally descriptive. It's the dark, fevered dream of a world where humanity and technology have been inextricably fused together with results both miraculous and profane. His prose is slick and jagged like a serrated knife; beautiful, breezy and hard-edged.

His verse is color of gunmetal and electricity and the texture of anger spilling on a meadow of dashed hope and unearned rewards. It is as much about mood as it is about message. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.

Yeah, I am a big, big fan. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.

A unique, important and truly amazing reading experience and it only took me three tries to realize it. View all 56 comments. May 13, J. A lozenge is a shape. Like a cube, or a triangle, or a sphere. I know that every time he types it, you are going to imagine a cough drop flying serenely by, but it's a shape. It's from heraldry for god's sake.

You may want to look up some synonyms to insert for yourself when he uses it, here are a few: diamond, rhombus, mascle. Now that the greatest obstacle in Gibson's vocabulary has been dealt with, I can tell you that he writes in one of the finest voices of any Science Fiction author.

His ab A lozenge is a shape. His ability to describe things in succinct, exciting, sexy ways is almost certainly the reason we owe him for words like 'cyberspace'.

It took twenty years for his visions of leather-clad kung-fu ladies and brain-computer interfaces to reach the mainstream in The Matrix, but only because he was that far ahead of his time. However, Gibson was no early adopter. He used a typewriter to write a book that predicted the internet, virtual reality, hacking, and all the nonsense we're embroiled in now and some stuff we're still waiting for. It can sometimes feel unoriginal, but, much like Shakespeare, that's because what we have today is based on what he was doing then.

Though Gibson may not be as radical as Dick, or as original as Bradbury, there is something in his words, his stories, and his 'coolness factor' that keep bringing me back. Indeed, he is much more accessible than the philosophically remote Dick, Bradbury, or Ellison, and all in a slick package. Just don't try to watch Johnny Mnemonic. He did write the best X-Files episode, though: 'Kill Switch'. He also wrote a script for Alien 3, which I have never read, but can state with certainty was better than the one they chose to film.

View all 40 comments. I am sorry, I really am. I tried really hard to finish it and made an attempt to resume reading after a break. I understand the huge influence the novel had on science fiction practically creating cyberpunk genre and introducing several words now in mainstream use.

I fully acknowledge it. Let me say what was wrong with it - in my opinion. If there was ever a victim of its own success, this book is it. It was so successful lots of people began developing the same theme and often much better. Take any kind of art and I can name better examples. Video games: System Shock and its sequel; Deux Ex is supposed to be equally good, but I have not played it. Literature: Snow Crash - if you ignore its abysmal ending or the total lack of thereof, to be exact.

Dare I say, Ready Player One? This one is debatable. The ideas presented are not so groundbreaking anymore. At one point somebody smuggled super-duper implantable memory chips with mind-boggling capacity measured in megabytes.

Change it into terabytes and I might stop laughing. What is left in a books when the ideas become old? The characters are absolutely positively flat; a piece of paper has more depth.

I could not care less about any one of them. Regarding the heroine of the book I keep imagining the following dialog between William Gibson and myself in my head: W. How cool is that? For your information every other heroine of a modern YA novel is a skilled assassin. Me: You are not being too original. In the modern days it is called bug-eye sunglasses: W.

Me: You mean, like Wolverine? So lame I am also curious with the amount of drugs consumed, what is the average life expectancy in that world?

Surely no more than I also need to mention the writing style. You - as a writer - is trying to tell a story. If your style gets in the way of it, this is not called unique writing style; this is called mental masturbation. The way this story is told makes it confusing enough. The writing style makes it incomprehensible. I give one star to the books I DNF. This time the second star is due to the huge influence of the novel at the time it was published.

I cannot give any more than that. View all 50 comments. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Adapted from ISawLightningFall. So I picked it up and I plowed through the first chapter, scratching my head the whole time. Then I shoved it onto my bookshelf, where it was quickly forgotten.

It was a dense, multilayered read, requiring more effort than a hormone-addled adolescent wanted to give. But few years later, I pulled the book down and gave it another chance.

Neuromancer is basically a futuristic crime caper. The main character is Case, a burnt-out hacker, a cyberthief. He cautiously agrees and finds himself joined by a schizophrenic ex-Special Forces colonel; a perverse performance artist who wrecks havoc with his holographic imaginings; a long-dead mentor whose personality has been encoded as a ROM construct; and a nubile mercenary with silver lenses implanted over her eyes, retractable razors beneath her fingernails and one heckuva chip on her shoulder.

Unlike most crime thrillers and many works of speculative fiction, Neuromancer is interested in a whole lot more that plot development. An African sailor with tribal scars on his face might meet a Japanese corporate drone implanted with microprocessors, the better to measure the mutagen in his bloodstream.

Gibson peppers his paragraphs with allusions to Asian geography and Rastafarianism, computer programming and corporate finance. He writes about subjects ranging from drug addiction and zero-gravity physics to synesthesia and brutal back-alley violence. And he writes with next to no exposition. You have to piece together the rest on your own. You bet. Echoes of its diction sound in my own writing. View all 38 comments.

Sometimes the key to understanding something is context. And never is that more the case than with the book Neuromancer. As just a book that I am reading, I would call it fair. But that is an evaluation without context. Under what context does my evaluation change? Well, one of the firs Context. Well, one of the first things I noticed when I picked it up is that it was originally published nearly 25 years ago, in And it is at that point that the context suddenly clicks and becomes crucial.

Neuromancer is a book about, in large part, individuals exploring and exploiting cyberspace and, to a lesser extent, about artificial intelligence. Pretty much no one had heard of the internet and email was virtually unknown. When one considers what the world was like, what fiction about computers was like, at the time it was written, Neuromancer must have been absolutely stunning.

The innovation and direction were ground-breaking in a way that little other fiction has likely been during our lifetime. An analogy would be the movie Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane is considered by many to be the greatest movie ever made.

Sit down and watch it with someone who enjoys movies but has never seen it. Citizen Kane is a decent film with a decent story, but is hardly a stunning, blow the mind away movie, in any sense. But again, that is if we view it without context. Contextually, Citizen Kane is one of the most influential movies ever made. Many have said, rightfully so, that it not only taught Hollywood how to make movies, it taught the audience how to watch movies.

Citizen Kane uses nonlinear plot and flashbacks. It uses unique camera angles and closeups and shadow, all in ways that were completely innovative and unheard of for the time.

Today, we watch Citizen Kane and it seems sort of ho-hum, because generations of movie makers and watchers have been influenced by it. At the time Citizen Kane was revolutionary, and it is in that context that its importance and influence are judged. While everything is created in some context, the context is not always critical.

Some works are timeless and stand fairly well on their own: I think a book like The Count of Monte Cristo or The Hobbit can largely be enjoyed or disliked by someone without appreciation of when and under what circumstances it was written others will disagree. Other works are best appreciated with respect to context. Citizen Kane was arguably even more revolutionary, although in somewhat subtler ways.

And it is with a consideration of context, that the importance and value of Neuromancer can be judged. I'm not trying to claim that Neuromancer is as important or ground breaking as Citizen Kane.

Neuormancer was likely not the first novel to explore the themes and concepts that it did, but it popularized a way of thinking about the role and future of computers and computer networks like no other novel has since.

I suspect the book is much easier to read now then it was when written, because so many terms and concepts which were new at the time are now just part of our current culture. View all 9 comments. Mar 01, E. What a terrible book. First, let me just say that I read for entertainment value.

Anything else that happens is gravy. That being said- the biggest reason this book is so awful is that Gibson's characters are completely hollow. Gibson makes it up as he goes along. He'll introduce a character, barely describe him and then 10 chapters later toss in another description. As if to say "Oh, yeah did I mention his hands were chainsaws? Yeah, they were totally chainsaws. Cool right? He doesn't just do this with characters, he does it with locations as well.

Never giving you a chance to really place the characters in a setting. Other than "a dark city street. The second reason this book is so bad, is Gibson's writing "style". I hate writing "styles". Stop trying to show off and just tell me a story. The "style" makes Neuromancer a very difficult book to read.

I'd read 2 or 3 chapters and literally have no idea what was going on. Gibson will write a whole page with four lines of dialog and the rest of the page will describe absolutely nothing. Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: "Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream. Gibson clearly just wanted to write a string of action sequences and techno-babel. Being a computer nerd myself, I found all of that interesting.

Towards the end the characters actually have dialog with each other and as things come to a head it actually get's entertaining here and there. Another huge plus is that this book is considered the first true Cyberpunk work and has been heavily mined by Hollywood, Anime and pop-culture in general.

Coining phrases like Matrix, Cyberspace, etc. For me, this was probably the first book I ever read just to say I read it. I don't regret it, but believe me, I'm glad it's over because I literally forced myself through it. Just wait for the movie. It'll probably make more sense. View all 17 comments. Towards the end of this novel, the protagonists, Case and Molly, are walking down the rooms of the Villa Straylight, which looks like an abandoned and labyrinthine library or museum, spinning in orbit around the Earth.

In Neuromancer , as in Duchamp, there is this massive display of artefacts and dehumanised techno stuff: on the one hand, computers, artificial intelligence, cyberspace, ROM modules, augmented ninjas, razorblade-fingertips, cyberspies, stealth aircraft, orbital space habitats Gibson ; on the other hand, a urinal, a staircase, a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a waterfall and illuminating gas, a box in a suitcase, lumps of sugar in a birdcage Duchamp.

The junction of these two contradictory movements, dirty bodies and hallucinatory objects, is precisely what defined surrealism in the s. His musical style makes Gibson a prominent prose writer, tied with American authors such as Philip K.

View all 14 comments. I am going to have to admit that I was utterly confused by the majority of this book. Eggs…of humming rainforest glass? Normally I would read a sentence like that and just throw in the towel. But for all its trippy, surreal, dense prose, this book still manages to convey so much. Reading it fee I am going to have to admit that I was utterly confused by the majority of this book.

Reading it feels a lot like listening to a classic opera: I may not speak Italian, but I can feel the emotion nonetheless. Burned and forever disconnected from the exhilarating high of the matrix, Case lives a numbed existence of drugs and petty crime.

I ached for her. Her flippant recall of a traumatic past, filled with loss and near continuous damage to her body and mind, made me ache. Now I really wish that I had read Johnny Mnemonic before this book, so that I could have a piece of her backstory from William Gibson and not from Keanu Reeves Although I just realized that Gibson wrote the screenplay!

I love that this vision of the future is so bleak, but so optimistic at the same time. Gibson made me exult in the evolution of a new consciousness; he made me feel limitless and bodiless. But he also made me so thankful to be awake and alive and bound up in all this meat. View all 27 comments. A bit of an embarrassment on the canon's part, really.

Oooh Harsh! This one's "a landmark novel" that was actually ripped off by thousands of other sci-fi endeavors afterwards, like a chunk of meat devoured by the ever-hungry idea-challenged. And it has explosive sentences with new and often-inexplicable lingo that ends making one feel alienated by the entire lit. It is a messy concoction thats too cool to let you ever, well, absorb.

To allow you A bit of an embarrassment on the canon's part, really. To allow you time to stop an smell the roses this would imply having a memorable time with the book. Guess I can see how that was revolutionary, at the time. But today, honey: NO! Everyone was killed except Corto, who was seriously wounded by Finnish defense forces as they were landing the helicopter. Corto's testimony was finessed to protect the military officers who had covered up knowledge of the EMP weapons, and Corto himself disappeared into the criminal underworld after undergoing extensive physical and mental rehabilitation.

In Istanbul , the team recruits Peter Riviera, an artist, thief, and drug addict who is able to project detailed holographic illusions with the aid of sophisticated cybernetic implants.

Although Riviera is a sociopath , Armitage coerces him into joining the team. The trail leads Case and Molly to a powerful artificial intelligence named Wintermute, created by the plutocratic Tessier-Ashpool family.

Control of the clan's fortune alternates among the family members, who spend most of their inactive time in cryonic preservation inside Villa Straylight, a labyrinthine mansion located at one end of the Freeside L5 O'Neill cylinder space habitat , which functions primarily as a Las Vegas -like space resort for the wealthy.

Wintermute's nature is finally revealed — it is one-half of a super-AI entity planned by the family, although its exact purpose is unknown. Wintermute was programmed by the Tessier-Ashpool dynasty with a need to merge with its other half — Neuromancer.

Unable to achieve this merger on its own, Wintermute recruited Armitage and his team to help complete the goal. Case is tasked with entering cyberspace to pierce the Turing-imposed software barriers using a powerful icebreaker program. Wintermute believes Riviera will pose an irresistible temptation to her, and that she will give him the password. The password must be spoken into an ornate computer terminal located in the Tessier-Ashpool home in Villa Straylight, and entered simultaneously as Case pierces the software barriers in cyberspace — otherwise the Turing lock will remain intact.

Armitage's team attracts the attention of the Turing Police, whose job is to prevent AIs from exceeding their built-in limitations. As Molly and Riviera gain entrance to Villa Straylight, three officers arrest Case and take him into custody; Wintermute manipulates the orbital casino's security and maintenance systems and kills the officers, allowing Case to escape. The Armitage personality starts to disintegrate and revert to the Corto personality as he relives Screaming Fist.

It is revealed that in the past, Wintermute had originally contacted Corto through a bedside computer during his convalescence, eventually convincing Corto that he was Armitage. Finally, Armitage becomes the shattered Corto again, but his newfound personality is short-lived as he is killed by Wintermute. Worried about Molly, Case tracks her down with help from Maelcum, his Rastafarian pilot. Neuromancer attempts to trap Case within a cyber-construct where he finds the consciousness of Linda Lee, his girlfriend from Chiba City, who was murdered by one of Case's underworld contacts.

Case manages to escape flatlining inside the construct after Maelcum gives him an overdose of a drug that can bypass his augmented liver and pancreas. Riviera blinds Hideo, but flees when he learns that the ninja is just as adept without his sight due to extensive practice while blindfolded.

Molly then explains to Case that Riviera is doomed anyway, as he has been fatally poisoned by a bad batch of drugs. With Lady 3Jane in possession of the password, the team makes it to the computer terminal. Case ascends to cyberspace to find the icebreaker has succeeded in penetrating its target; Lady 3Jane is induced to give up her password and the lock is opened.

Wintermute unites with Neuromancer, fusing into a greater entity. The poison in Case's bloodstream is washed out, and he and Molly are handsomely paid for their efforts, while Pauley's ROM construct is apparently erased at his own request.

In the epilogue, Molly leaves Case, who later finds a new girlfriend and resumes his hacking work. Scanning old recorded transmissions from the s, the super-AI finds a lone AI transmitting from the Alpha Centauri star system. The novel ends with the sound of inhuman laughter, a trait associated with Pauley during Case's work with his ROM construct.

Neuromancer' s release was not greeted with fanfare, but it hit a cultural nerve, [9] quickly becoming an underground word-of-mouth hit. It is among the most-honored works of science fiction in recent history, and appeared on Time magazine's list of best English-language novels written since Neuromancer is considered "the archetypal cyberpunk work".

The novel has had significant linguistic influence, popularizing such terms as cyberspace and ICE Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. Gibson himself coined the term "cyberspace" in his novelette " Burning Chrome ", published in by Omni magazine. In his afterword to the re-issue of Neuromancer , fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet developed, particularly the World Wide Web after the publication of Neuromancer in He asks "[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?

Norman Spinrad , in his essay "The Neuromantics" which appears in his non-fiction collection Science Fiction in the Real World , saw the book's title as a triple pun: "neuro" referring to the nervous system; "necromancer"; and "new romancer. Lawrence Person in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" identified Neuromancer as "the archetypal cyberpunk work", [14] and in , Time included it in their list of the best English-language novels written since , opining that "[t]here is no way to overstate how radical [ Neuromancer ] was when it first appeared.

Cover art of volume one of the Tom de Haven and Jensen graphic novel adaptation, published by Epic Comics in An unabridged version of this book was read by Arthur Addison and made available from Books on Tape The full-cast dramatization was presented in two hour-long episodes.