Key themes
- Humanity and its technological extension
- Corporate power in a post-national world
- Identity, memory and the body
About this book
A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.
Published in 1984 and winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer was Gibson's first novel, written on a manual typewriter by a writer who was afraid of computers.
Discussion questions
- Case is a criminal and a drug addict, not a hero. Why does the novel choose him as its protagonist, and does Gibson want us to sympathise with him?
- Gibson coined 'cyberspace' and imagined many technologies that have since arrived in some form. Which of his extrapolations feel most prescient — and which feel most rooted in the anxieties of 1984?
- Molly's body is her primary tool — she is more comfortable in physical space than Case is. What does the novel say through the contrast between their relationships to their bodies?
- The AIs in the novel — Wintermute and Neuromancer — have different desires. What does Gibson suggest about what artificial intelligence might want, and whether those wants would align with human interests?
- Neuromancer is often credited with inventing cyberpunk as a genre and with anticipating the internet. Reading it now, what still feels visionary and what feels dated?
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