I don't think I really understood this book. I looked it up on Wikipedia when I had finished thinking I just must have missed most of the plot because I was reading too fast but nope, exactly what I thought had happened happened. It was just weird. This is one of those books with a fantastical setting that does no exposition and just lets you learn what's going on by reading the story which in general I like but here left me a bit adrift.

It follows Case, who used to be a "cowboy" in the Matrix (two concepts I could have really used some more introduction on). Then he tried to cheat his bosses out of money and they gave him some poison that inhibits his brain. So he moves to a shady area of I think Japan and becomes addicted to drugs. He has a girlfriend, ish. He's also on some mob boss's hitlist. Then a guy called Armitage finds him, along with Molly, who is weirdly enhanced in all sorts of ways. Armitage gets rid of his addiction and his handicapped brain issue in return for his services. Linda dies, Case starts sleeping with Molly. Molly and Case are suspicious of Armitage and try to research what's actually going on - turns out an artificial intelligence called Wintermute is pulling the strings. I think the jist is that Wintermute and Neuromancer are the two artificial intelligences produced by this company where the lady who invented them wanted humans to not have to anything ever anymore but just like chill and be animals, and everything else could be run by AI, which goes against the Turing police code or something.

There's a lot of Case jacking in and out of the matrix and seeing things through Molly's eyes because she has some modification that lets that happen. They need to find a password to achieve something. I was consistently unclear on whether they were helping the AIs or against the AIs, to be honest, but I think they end up helping the AIs, or at least the AIs win whether they want them to or not. Also Molly's leg is broken for like half this book and she just walks around on it b/c extra dopamine. Neuromancer creates a fake Linda and fake kid, except they're not fake, he just uploaded their consciousnesses or something. In the epilogue, Case, who is once again a cowboy, sees from a distance that he is now also with them, so there is also a Neuromancer-generated Case identity online.

I...eh. I mean cyberpunk is really not my thing, I'm just not into it. I also found this book massively hard to follow. A big part of that was how dense the description is. Almost everything comes with adjectives, subordinate clauses, gerunds etc. furthering the description of stuff and it makes it really hard to filter out what parts are important to the plot and what parts are just evocative descriptions of Molly's boobs, because everything is incredibly detailed. In a way though I really like that choice because it's kind of reminiscent of the absolute overload of information you get online. Or in the Matrix I guess. I am also not a huge fan of oh-my-god-the-evil-AIs-will-destroy-us stories because I don't think AIs are that terrible, but I do think Gibson die it in an interesting way in that he didn't have them be totally evil, just kind of weird and scary and off. And also they win, and nothing really changes.