The future of William Gibson's Neuromancer is a dark, post-industrial place careening toward a nihilistic, technology-saturated oblivion. It's a time when biologically enhanced street samurai--complete with vat-grown muscles, surgically embedded finger-razors and all-seeing night-vision eyes--wage war in the back alleys of crumbling cities. Meanwhile, globalization has reached its pinnacle with the birth of cyberspace, a world-spanning "consensual hallucination" that makes today's Internet look like informational roadkill. Equipped with neural jacks, cyber-cowboys are able to plug their minds directly into this digital matrix, and then manipulate it through will and skill.

Case is one of these latter-day crackers. He's good, but not the best, a fact driven home when he tried to siphon money away from a client, got caught, and had his ability to access the matrix burned out of him. As the story opens, he's living in the worst part of a Japanese near-future sprawl known as Chiba City. Although no longer terrorizing cyberspace for fun and profit, he's still on the wrong side of the law. He's got a death wish, and it's only a matter of time before one of his ever-riskier scams goes bad or he overdoses on his drug of choice.

A man named Armitage saves him. Together with a street samurai named Molly, he arranges Case's rehabilitation, including a new pancreas that screens out the drugs he loves. Armitage also arranges for a special surgery that restores Case's ability to jack into the matrix, an operation that's a preamble to a series of cyber-adventures far more dangerous than anything he'd ever dreamed of.

But as Case comes to know his new benefactors, he realizes that Armitage isn't all he appears to be, and that someone else--something else--is pulling his strings. The only question is, will he survive the puppet show?

Molding a cyberpunk manifesto

Reading Neuromancer is like walking through a lucid nightmare filled with high technology, amoral protagonists, manipulative villains and endless chromed webs of intrigue. In other words, it's cyberpunk. But Neuromancer isn't just a cyberpunk novel, it's the cyberpunk novel, the novel that fans can point to as a watershed moment in the dark-future genre.

The novel was released in 1984, just as the cyberpunk movement was building toward its crescendo. Unlike earlier mainstream science fiction that had a far more positive outlook on technology, Neuromancer extrapolates a future in which technology is far more like a disease than a blessing. It reverberates with the fears of that era, especially America's deep-seated insecurities about Japan's technological prowess and the "dehumanization" of people by technology.

Despite the gloom and doom, though, there's a lot in the novel to like. Gibson coined the term cyberspace, a term that was much abused--and, for the most part, totally misunderstood--throughout the '90s. His vision of being able to mentally explore immense amounts of data, to truly experience the net rather than just idly surf it, is just as compelling today as when the novel was released. Gibson's writing style is dense but mesmerizing, forcing readers to pay careful attention to the prose, but rewarding them with crisp mental images for doing so. The technological metaphors Gibson uses to describe Case's actions in cyberspace work far better than those attempted by other cyberpunk adherents.

Those who think the world is going to hell in a technological handbasket will love this book. Those who don't won't like it nearly as much, but should still read it to see why the other half thinks the world's in the aforementioned handbasket.