donn%utah-cs@sri-unix.UUCP (07/09/84)
From: donn@utah-cs (Donn Seeley) NEUROMANCER. William Gibson. Ace Specials, c1984. Non-spoiler review: Buy it, buy it! Micro-spoiler review: This is a futuristic thriller which deals with 'cyberspace'. Some between-the-lines tribute is given to Vernor Vinge's TRUE NAMES, which seems to have been the first real implementation of the idea. Gibson's world is very different from Vinge's, however, and the action takes place in various seedy settings reminiscent of the movie BLADERUNNER. The action is nonstop, and the characters and setting have a gritty, realistic feel. If you are afraid of downer novels, beware that the protagonists of NEUROMANCER are not particularly sympathetic (in fact they are all professional criminals), and a lot of, well, bad language is used. But the book is so skillfully done and the suspense is so great that I couldn't put the book down once I'd started it. Mini-spoiler review: This is William Gibson's first novel -- NEUROMANCER is the third Ace Special in the series edited by Terry Carr, where all the books (so far) are first novels. (I've reviewed the previous two Specials here before: THE WILD SHORE by Kim Stanley Robinson and GREEN EYES by Lucius Shepard. Algis Budrys in F&SF thought THE WILD SHORE was very good (with some qualifications) and went ga-ga over GREEN EYES; my feelings are similar. By the way, NEUROMANCER apparently got very good reviews from Norman Spinrad in IASFM recently.) For a first novel, this book is amazingly good. Now a little plot teaser. (Those of you who hate to hear anything about plots, skip this paragraph.) Case used to be a cyberspace cowboy, someone who could jack into the world of cyberspace and penetrate corporate defenses to bring back data for whoever could pay the price. He crossed his bosses once, though, and they poisoned him with a mycotoxin which destroys the nerve endings necessary to be able to jack, leaving him stranded in the world of 'meat'. Now he is slowly degenerating into drug addiction, petty crime and suicidal mania in the Japanese city of Chiba, where anyone with the money can have any kind of surgery done, but Case hasn't the money to repair himself. Case cheats the fence he deals with and the fence sends some hoods to rub Case out, but at the last possible moment Case is rescued by members of an organization without a name. They hold out the possibility of a deal: they will reconstruct Case's ravaged nervous system if he will agree to go on an extremely dangerous mission whose object they refuse to divulge. The course of the mission takes Case to BAMA, the city with the slang name of Sprawl which covers the old eastern seaboard of the US, to the warrens of Istanbul, and to the satellite of Freeside where the rich go to play and occasionally to die. The climax, however, is in cyberspace, where Case must penetrate a massively secure system without being 'flatlined', i.e., avoiding brain death from overstimulation. This plus ninja assassins, the Turing police, punk terrorists, the Rastafarian Space Navy and lots more. In some ways this book resembles Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION, especially from the point of view of the incredible pacing and the violence and the plot fireworks, but there are also a few similarities in characters. The descriptive language and dialogue really grab you with detail; this world comes alive, detestable as some of it is. Curiously, this book is hard science fiction, although it doesn't read like it, and you get the feeling that the social consequences of the technology that he postulates have all been carefully worked out (although I have a few nits to pick, as usual). NEUROMANCER sort of one-ups TRUE NAMES -- if Vinge is working on an expanded version of TRUE NAMES, it will be interesting to see how they compare... Enjoy, Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept. donn@utah-cs.ARPA [Note the new address!] decvax!utah-cs!donn