Neuromancer by William Gibson

First published: 1984

Type of plot: Science fiction

Time of work: The late twenty-first century

Locale: Japan, New York, Istanbul, and space habitats orbiting Earth

Principal Characters:

• Case, a street hustler and former data thief
• Linda Lee, a street woman, Case’s lover
• Molly, a mercenary and former prostitute, another of Case’s lovers
• Armitage, a former special forces soldier, now a criminal operative
• Pauley McCoy, also known as
• Dixie Flatline, Case’s deceased mentor
• Peter Reveira, a performing holographic artist
• Aerol, a member of a Rastafarian space colony
• Maelcum, another member of the colony
• 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, an heiress
• Hideo, 3Jane’s bodyguard, a ninja clone
• Wintermute, an artificial intelligence
• Neuromancer, an artificial intelligence

The Novel

William Gibson divides Neuromancer into three parts, plus an epilogue. The first takes place in Chiba City, a Japanese industrial town where Case is a street hustler. The second part occurs in New York and Istanbul, and the third takes place on two space stations in orbit around the earth. All the events take place within a few months in the late twenty-first century. Gibson uses an omniscient third-person narrator throughout the story, but the narrator describes events only from Case’s point of view and invents jargon and slang.

The European section of Chiba City is a slum with little or no supervision by law enforcement. Anything is available for a price. In addition to the traditional rackets of drug trafficking and prostitution, there is trade in stolen computer hardware and pirated software.

Cash is illegal in Japan and rarely used for legitimate transactions elsewhere in the world. Linda Lee, Case’s girlfriend, steals a memory chip containing money from Case. When she attempts to sell it, the supposed buyer simply kills her rather than pay her price.

The same night, Case meets Molly, a mercenary. Molly escorts Case to Armitage, who is planning some sort of illegal operation. He both bribes and blackmails Case into joining them.

The location then shifts to New York City, now only one part of the Sprawl, officially known as BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis). By this time, there is a continuous city stretching from Boston to Atlanta, with the greatest density around Atlanta and New York. Here the conspirators rehearse their plot by breaking into the headquarters of Sense/Net, a corporation. The Panther Moderns, a professional terrorist group, aid them. Molly has an implant in her brain that allows Case to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste everything Molly does. The communication is strictly one-way; Molly gets no information from Case. Molly physically breaks into the building while Case breaks into the computer system to assist her. He does not use a monitor and keyboard. By this time, the Internet has evolved into what Gibson calls the “matrix,” which uses virtual reality. Case directly connects his brain to the matrix. Molly steals a data construct that contains the personality and memories of the late Dixie Flatline, formerly Case’s mentor.

The location shifts once again to Istanbul, where the plotters kidnap a performing holographic artist, Peter Reveira, and recruit him for their conspiracy. Istanbul is also the first place where Wintermute directly contacts Case. Wintermute is an artificial intelligence that controls Armitage and is the driving force behind their plot.

The conspirators then take a space shuttle to a small space habitat called Zion. Earlier in the century, a group of Rastafarians founded Zion for the purpose of providing a refuge for their people. Wintermute has recruited them for his operation by claiming to be a prophet and claiming that the Last Days predicted in the biblical Book of Revelation have arrived. The Rastafarian elders do not trust Wintermute because Revelations also warns that there will be a false prophet in the Last Days. Nevertheless, they provide the conspirators with logistical support for their operation and assign Aerol and Maelcum to help them. The Rastafarians transport them to Freeside, a much larger space habitat.

Peter Reveira’s show attracts the attention of 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, whose family owns the Tessier-Ashpool Corporation, which controls both Wintermute and Freeside. She invites Reveira into her family’s portion of Freeside, where he helps Molly get inside. However, he then betrays her.

Molly meets Hideo, a Ninja clone who wounds her. At the same time, Case breaks into the computer system with the aid of the Dixie Flatline construct. He meets Neuromancer, another artificial intelligence owned by Tessier-Ashpool. Neuromancer creates a virtual-reality world consisting of a beach house inhabited by Linda Lee. However, Case resists the temptation to live with this virtual-reality version of Linda and exits the system. Case then leaves his console and physically follows Molly into the Tessier-Ashpool enclave. He rescues her, and they confront 3Jane, who knows the codes that can free Wintermute and Neuromancer.

The Characters

Two years before the beginning of the story, Henry Dorsett Case, the point-of-view character, was a “console cowboy.” He could directly interface his brain with the worldwide computer system, the matrix. He used his abilities as a data thief. When he attempted to double-cross his employers, they damaged with a toxic drug the portion of his brain used for the interface. At the beginning of the story, he is a street hustler and has killed three people. He is also a heavy drug user; he is twenty-four years old at the time of the novel.

Otherwise, the reader can divide most of the characters into criminals and victims. Linda Lee is the purest example of a victim. She is a twenty-year-old drug abuser and computer-game devotee.

Among the criminals are Peter Reveira, a performing holographic artist and sadist; 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, heir to the Tessier-Ashpool fortune, member of the idle rich, drug abuser, and thrill seeker; and even Molly, a mercenary whom people call a “razorgirl” because she has had retractable razor blades surgically implanted beneath her fingernails. She also has artificial eyes. At one time, Molly was a prostitute.

Armitage is interesting in that he is both a criminal and a victim. Under his real name of Willis, he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces during the Three Week War between the United States and Russia. His superiors betrayed him when they ordered him on a mission that could not succeed. He survived, but at the cost of his sanity. He reconstructed himself as Armitage, criminal mastermind, but his hold on normalcy is tenuous.

Dixie Flatline, also known as Pauley McCoy, is a deceased “cyberspace cowboy” who got his nickname from the number of times he experienced brain death while connected to cyberspace. His memories and knowledge have been stored electronically, but this version of Dixie asks to be erased when the mission is completed. As a cyberspace cowboy he was a criminal, but as a data construct, he is a victim.

Wintermute and Neuromancer are artificial intelligences whose motivations are not entirely understandable to humans. Wintermute controls Armitage but also communicates directly with Case via virtual-reality versions of Case’s acquaintances. The purpose of Wintermute’s plot is to free himself of his bondage to Tessier-Ashpool and unite with Neuromancer, another artificial intelligence owned by that corporation. Wintermute is the decision maker and, behind the scenes, the true protagonist of the novel. Neuromancer appears to Case as a Brazilian youth and has a true personality.

Aerol, Maelcum, and Hideo are the only major characters motivated by duty. The elders of the Rastafarian space colony order Aerol and Maelcum to assist Armitage’s operation, and they do so at great personal risk. Hideo is a clone whose manufacturers have genetically engineered and psychologically conditioned him to be a bodyguard; the reader might question whether Hideo has ever had to make a moral choice.

Critical Context

The first novel to win all three major awards for science fiction—the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award—Neuromancer has its roots in two kinds of science fiction. The first is the New Wave of the 1960’s, which emphasized literary craftsmanship and style. New Wave writers such J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock included descriptions of life on the streets, rock and roll, and the effects of drugs in their science fiction. This influence gives Neuromancer its emotional edge and gothic atmosphere.

The second kind of science fiction that influenced Neuromancer is the traditional “hard” science fiction of writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. These writers typically extrapolate current trends and new technology and project their effects on people and society. Yet where traditional science fiction concerns itself with such technologies as rockets, robots, atomic energy, and space stations, Gibson writes about prosthetics, microprocessors implanted within the human body, cosmetic surgery, virtual reality, cloning, and genetic engineering. Clarke helped to invent the concept of the communications satellite; in turn, Gibson and the other cyberpunk authors developed the concept of a worldwide virtual-reality network.

By the time Gibson wrote Neuromancer, microprocessors were appearing everywhere; even new cars contained microcontroller devices under their hoods. People wore portable radios and headphones while they jogged, carried cellular phones and pagers, and played computer games for recreation. Although the Internet was in its infancy, computer-literate people dialed up local bulletin boards and on-line services. More affluent people could elect surgery to remove the need for eyeglasses or contact lenses. Gibson extrapolated what the world would be like if those trends continued.

Gibson, in turn, has influenced both computer hackers and computer scientists, although he himself knew little about computers when he wrote the novel. For example, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists named a remote camera platform after Molly, the lead female character in Neuromancer, and a German computer criminal cited the novel as an influence at his trial. Moreover, writers studying the Internet and virtual reality credit Gibson with coining the term “cyberspace” to describe the on-line world.

Bibliography

Delany, Samuel. Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994. Pages 172-174 deal specifically with Gibson, and there are other comments on Gibson and cyberpunk sprinkled through the book. By an author often associated with the New Wave.

Dozois, Gardner, ed. Modern Classics of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. The editor’s introduction to Gibson’s story “The Winter Market” summarizes Gibson’s career until 1991.

Hartwell, David, ed. The Science Fiction Century. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1997. Hartwell’s introductory remarks to Gibson’s story “Johnny Mnemonic” and the overall concept of this anthology put Gibson’s work in historical context.

Hartwell, David, and Kathryn Kramer, eds. The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. The editors, along with contributor Gregory Benford, place Gibson’s work in relationship to traditional science fiction.

Sterling, Bruce, ed. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Arbor House, 1986. The preface provides a good overview of cyberpunk writings.