Neuromancer, like all really good stories, is about a heist.1 It starts off with such a mess of weird names and confusing scenes, I almost stopped reading in the second chapter, but I'm glad I didn't.
Our hero, Case, used to be a very gifted hacker, but he stole from his bosses and they burned his nervous system so he couldn't connect into the matrix2 anymore. And so he's stuck in a futuristic Tokyo ghetto hiding from his unhappiness behind a variety of substances.3
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.
Along comes Molly. Molly's got herself some Morpheus glasses surgically implanted in front of her eyes and razor blades that retract behind her fingernails. Is she an assassin? Some kind of military asset? Whatever: she's badass. And it's hard not to love her.4
And Case does love Molly. He falls for her hard. Before you know it, Case is getting all kinds of expensive surgical repairs funded by a mysterious backer who's representative shows up in the form of Mr Armitrage, only survivor of Operation Screaming Fist, and announces that he's assembling a team5 to hack into an AI and steal something.
To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names...
There's some great stuff in here about AIs, and it's striking to hear Gibson in 1984 sounding not so different than a lot of the AI critics today.6 And, of course, the agency in charge of regulating AIs is called Turing.7
Of course, all is not as it seems. Molly and Case get suspicious about who's backing them. They do a bit of digging and discover that the AI they are targeting is also their employer. This is when the story really gets going. You should read it.
Footnotes
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Lord of the Rings, Catch-22, Moby-Dick, Harry Potter, 1984, Wuthering Heights, Dune, heck, even the Bible is a heist story if you think about it. ↩
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Yes, that Matrix. Gibson created the concept sometime before 1984, when he published Neuromancer. "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children, being taught mathematical concepts...a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system." ↩
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I'm not very knowledgeable about drug culture and I don't know what you have to take to feel like this: "a white hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy." ↩
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Molly's motivations are a bit of a mystery to me. She seems to be your typical violent lady with cybernetic augmentation on a revenge-quest to resolve some pretty awful things that happened to her when she was young and innocent (honestly, rather than heists this might be the actual basis of every good story)...except, the awful things happened because she was trying earn enough money to turn herself into the ultimate weapon--kinda putting the cart before the horse, as they say. ↩
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Supposedly, Akira Kurosawa created the "I'm assembling a team" motif with his 1954 Seven Samurai, but, honestly, what was Elrond doing at the council in Rivendale or Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales or Jesus at the Last Supper? ↩
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"Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead." ↩
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Is it really cyberpunk if it doesn't mention Turing? ↩