Cheryl Meany
Book Report #1
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Neuromancer is considered to be “the Bible of Cyberpunk” (The Cyberpunk
Project) and helped to create a new literary movement called Cyberpunk Literature. This
genre is a subset of Science Fiction and has gained in status since Neuromancer’s
publishing in 1984. The term cyberpunk derives from its handling of marginalized
peoples (the quintessential “punk”) in an era of global technological systems. These
systems dominate the world landscape and control all aspects of the lives of those that
live within them. This place where those living on the fringe of a technologically
controlled and enhanced world meet the “system” in control is where the unlikely hero of
Neuromancer originates.
This novel opens in an underground world of its own, Night City in Chiba. Case,
our hero of sorts, begins his story in a run-down bar in the middle of world controlled by
drugs and hustlers. The reader comes to understand early on in the novel that Case is a
man who lost his place in this new cyber-controlled world.
The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of
technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d
suffered in that Memphis hotel.
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’d cut in Night City,
and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices or logic unfolding across
that colorless void…The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific
now, 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, his hands clawed into the bedslab,
temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t
there (5).
There in the opening pages of the novel, Gibson reveals the conflict at the heart of
the whole work. Case is a man who has been wronged and desires vindication. He was
tossed out of the cyberworld he had always known because he was trying to get ahead. At
the very center of this novel lies the eternal, archetypal conflict of the haves vs. the havenots. Case is a man who spent his prior life as a console cowboy, working for a
corporation in cyberspace. His ambitions led him to steal from his employers who,
consequently, discovered his betrayal and made him pay. “Of course he was welcome,
they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because – still
smiling – they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his
nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin” (6). Thus, the adventure into this
Bible of Cyberpunk begins with an unlikely, marginalized hero searching to recapture his
former glory as a cyberspace cowboy.
The reader is introduced to Molly, an artificial razorgirl employed by Armitage,
who is sent to deliver Case. The cards are soon laid on the table; Case agrees to hack into
Sense/Net’s mainframe and steal Dixie Flatline’s construct for Armitage to utilize in his
ultimate quest and, in return, Case gets to keep the antidote to the neurotoxins in his head,
therefore regaining his past life. Armitage constructed a guarantee for Case’s loyalty
while they were fixing Case up:
You have time to do what I’m hiring you for, Case, but that’s all. Do the
job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without
opening the sacs [containing mycotoxin]. Then you’ll need a blood change.
Otherwise, the sacs melt and you’re back where we found you. So you see, Case,
you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the
gutter (46).
Unable to deny the lure of cyberspace and the return to his former life, Case soon
finds himself in the middle of a global plot to hack into one of the world’s preeminent
artificial intelligences. Throughout their journey to unite the world’s two largest AI
systems, Wintermute and Neuromancer, Case and Molly discover that Armitage himself
is a construct, a hologram of sorts. He was created by Wintermute after a failed special
forces mission in which the government was basically testing biological and
technological developments on its soldiers. The reader, and Case himself, enter this
construct known as cyberspace and the lines between reality and the cyber reality of the
matrix continue to blur. Case finds himself flipping between his own involvement in the
plan to unite the AIs and Molly’s reality inside the matrix. The lines continue to blur and
the reader finds it difficult to identify what is part of the cyberspace construct and what is
part of what is left of the human experience in this novel.
This struggle between reality and an artificial construct culminates as Case and
Molly creep closer and closer to the center of the Tessier-Ashpool global creation. Molly
disappears and can only be accessed by Case within the realm of cyberspace where Case
can flip into her version of reality but cannot communicate with her. Armitage begins to
lose control of his constructed persona and reverts back to General Corto’s personality as
Case nears Lady 3Jane Marie-France, the clone monarch or the Tessier-Ashpool
corporation. Riviera, the conman hired by Armitage because of his ability to project
holograms, tries to kill Molly and Case as they near the password that Lady 3Jane MarieFrance holds that could finally unite Wintermute and Neuromancer.
It is during this climax of the action where the lines between human reality and
artificial construct truly blur for the reader. It is hard to distinguish what is happening
within the construct of the AIs and the Tessier-Ashpool Corporation and what is not. This
is truly central to the genre of cyberpunk literature that Gibson constructed. This novel
culminates at a point where human is no longer truly human and reality is no longer truly
reality. Both a constructs of a larger, global entity through the matrix in cyberspace. The
ending does not serve to provide resolution to any of the characters. None of them really
changed. None of them learned from their plight. Case emerges with a large bank
account, large enough to clear his system of the mycotoxin and start a life in the Sprawl
with a new girl and a new matrix to explore. Wintermute returns to tell Case that “things
aren’t different. Things are things” (259). The creation of the AI didn’t really change
anything. Wintermute and Neuromancer are still everywhere and everything, same as
before. Molly disappears from Case’s life and all the other character constructs, including
Riviera and Linda, appear to Case only in cyberspace. Our “hero” does end the novel
back in the life construct he desired but was he truly better off? His reality becomes the
construct and that is where his struggle ends. Case ends the novel hearing again, “the
laugh that wasn’t laughter” (261). Another false human construct in his cyberspace
reality.