This book won a slew of awards when it was published in 1984, and I can see why. The read itself is an adventure. It's a book that never lets you settle. You never feel like you are on familiar ground. And while it's not the only book that imagines a digital world people plug in to, it is the skill with which it paints the picture that is so incredible.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.
Honestly I was lost for a lot of this book. There's not too many characters and their not too hard to keep straight. But the jumps between what is "real" and "not real" always made me question what was going on. Every character is mysterious in a different way and no one is in any rush to tell you why.
We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
The people they are stealing from (I hesitate to call them the antagonist) are also concealed for a large portion of the book. Who is helping them and why is a question with many different answers. It seems no character has entered the story for the same reason. And in the middle of the constant tug of motives, Case, the main character digital cowboy, seems to be just enjoying his life back in the matrix and trying to avoid losing the ability again.
I imagine Neuromancer is probably a book that benefits from a second reading. The first reading was certainly a ride.