William Gibson, Neuromancer

Over the summer, I was sitting on the roof of a friend's apartment in Jersey City, chatting about novels as the sun set, and he recommend Neuromancer by William Gibson (thanks Josh).  It had been ages -- years and years -- since I read some good, straight-up sci-fi.  This genre was a staple of my teen years (Last week, I was surprised to see that there is a new film coming out of Ender's Game, which was my favorite sic-fi novel at the time, staring a kid named Asa!).

Neuromancer was published in that greatest of science fiction years, 1984, and it depicts a dystopic future in which the rich live lives apart from the rest of society, encapsulated in bubbles of pleasure, and the rest live in squalor, in which everyone is connected by a computer network, and hackers are the elite of the criminal class, in which computer viruses made in China are used by criminals to hack into the world of the rich.  Sound familiar?  What was certainly wild fantasy and speculation thirty years ago is, well, the world we live in.  Ok, I exaggerate.  The rich don't live on space stations, so this world is nothing like ours.

The main character is a fairly unlikeable down-and-out everyman named Case, a former master hacker whose nervous system was altered by an angry former associate in order to stop him from being able to plug himself directly into the Matrix.  Case is hired (somewhat coercively) by a shady individual who wants him to pull off an impossible hack, with the help of a biotechnologically augmented samurai with razor claws named, surprisingly, Molly.  They are also helped by a ROM of Case's old mentor, now dead but kept conscious within a computer.

There is a bit of sex and a lot of drugs, but the most compelling passages are the descriptions of Case's work within the Matrix, a sort-of immersive visualization of the codes within computers.  No, not like Neo and his pals, not really, though certainly the Wachowski Brothers must had been influenced by Neuromancer.  Gibson gives us beautiful descriptions of the architecture of the virus, as it merges with its host, and Case's movements as he soars through it.  There is, even in their pain and panic and in the general breakdown of society, beauty.