Neuromancer hit science fiction like a railgun shell, and deservedly so. This is one hell of a book: a dark cynical hotwired take on technology, crime, power, and ambition. Gibson is a top-tier prose stylist, and right from the start ("The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel...") he pulls you into a world of the Sprawl, of corporate games on an international levels, of crooks and spooks, of AI trying to evolve into something new.

The story follows Case, ex-keyboard cowboy and hacker, plummeting towards 'suicide-by-gangster' in Chiba City. His talent burned out by a vengeful employer he stole from, Case will move anything, make any deal, knowing that he's headed towards crossing a fatal line. He's given a second chance by Molly, a street samurai with upgraded reflexes and retractable blades under her fingers, working for Armitage, a blank-faced corporate cipher, and ultimately, Wintermute; an AI that has put together a team to hack itself, in violation of the basic laws that govern relationships between human beings and artificial intelligences: Never build one too smart.

Every part of this book hits home individually: the fast moving plot, the techno-noir stylings, the globe-trotting setting. But there are two things that lift Gibson far above the people who came after him. The first is that his philosophy is existentialist, not nihilist. Case, Molly, even Armitage, are profoundly damaged people trying to piece together lives on the margins of a society blowing itself apart on simulated reality and advanced technology, but they're *trying*. They're not the empty, gun-fetishistic, black-leather clad macho parodies of the genre that it's so easy to fall into--and which Gibson somehow presciently satires in one of Riveria's twisted hologram tableaux in the Villa Straylight. Second, Gibson has something interesting to say about power, in that it is literally dehumanizing. The entities that rule the world are strange post-human conglomerates: Corporate memory banks, rogue AI, clans of cryogenically preserved clones, CGI personality constructs. A lot of the later cyberpunk literature parroted this without understanding it, in the replacement of the nation-state with mega-corporations, or backstabbing Mr. Johnsons selling out the heroes, or heroic anarchist artists against soul-sucking plastic corporate goons. But for Gibson, it is always about what you lose, and what you keep with you as you approach that apex of power.