Neuromancer
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: February 9, 2017 3:54 PM | Last Updated: June 27, 2018
William Gibson
Before the Internet was commonplace, William Gibson showed us the Matrix — a world within the world, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace. Henry Dorsett Case was the sharpest data-thief in the Matrix, until an ex-employer crippled his nervous system. Now a new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run against an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a mirror-eyed girl street-samurai riding shotgun, he's ready for the silicon-quick, bleakly prophetic adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction. (From Penguin Classics)
William Gibson is credited with creating the literary science-fiction genre "cyberpunk," and Neuromancer was the first book to win the sci-fi "triple-crown": the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Hugo Award.
From the book
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.
From Neuromancer by William Gibson ©2000. Published by Penguin Classics.