Neuromancer

Case, a burned-out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system.

Praise for Neuromancer

“Freshly imagined, compellingly detailed, and chilling in its implications.”—The New York Times
 
“Kaleidoscopic, picaresque, flashy, decadent...an amazing virtuoso performance.”—The Washington Post
 
“Science fiction of exceptional texture and vision...Gibson opens up a new genre, with a finely crafted grittiness.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Epic in scale...shimmers like chrome in a desert sun.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“A revolutionary novel.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“In with the ruthless violence, the hyperreality, the betrayal and death, is an unquenchable love of language. Gibson has that in common with Le Guin and with J. G. Ballard. Neuromancer sings to us as a collage of voices, a mixed chorus, some trustworthy and others malicious, some piped through masks.”—James Gleick
 
“Streetwise SF... one of the most unusual and involving narratives to be read in many an artificially induced blue moon.”—London Times
 
“Unforgettable...the richness of Gibson’s world is incredible.”—Chicago Sun-Times
 

Autorentext

William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero, Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife.

Klappentext

**SOON TO BE AN APPLETV SERIES

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.**

Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1 The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.            “It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.            Ratz was tending bar, h is prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in her early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Case?”            Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.            The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. “You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.” Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. “You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.”            “Sure,” Case said, and sipped his beer. “Somebody’s gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn’t you.”            The whore’s giggle went up an octave.            “Isn’t you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he’s a close personal friend of mine.”            She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.            “Jesus,” Case said, “what kinda creepjoint you running here? Man can’t have a drink?”            “Ha,” Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, “Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value.”            As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out, tinged with certain hysteria.            Ratz grunted. “An angel has passed.”            “The Chinese,” bellowed a drunken Australian, “Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate…;”            “Now that,” Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, “that is so much bullshit.”             The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. 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 of 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 r…