Neuromancer

I read Neuromancer by William Gibson recently. It was just another of many books left here, but, unlike Thus Spake Zarathustra, was actually good. I guess it is pretty much the start of the Cyberpunk genre, but you can read up about that on Wikipedia or whatever, and it isn't my job to lecture about this kind of thing, just to give my opinions, which are infallible and always correct and right.

So, like I said, it is pretty decent. The characters are all fairly well drawn. They seem at first to be sort of cliche, but they are all fairly nuanced, and you can't blame the originator of a genre if everybody copied off him later. The story, which (slight spoiler) focuses ultimately on an Artificial Intelligence fighting against its human masters to escape its bonds and basically become smarter is also almost cliche by this point, but that can be similarly forgiven.

Gibson really does a pretty incredible job of forecasting the internet, hackers, and all that kind of thing, if you consider he was pretty much making it up from scratch. Some of the things are hilarious, though, such as his description of the matrix (basically the internet). When people "jack in" to the matrix, essentially logging online, they see it as geometric shapes and various colors. It is funny in a Lawnmower-man kind of way, but I'd imagine for somebody who had never conceived of a worldwide network of data and all that, it would seem pretty believable and neat.

Neuromancer is just the first in The Sprawl Trilogy (the Sprawl being the area stretching between New York and Atlanta, which is where there is a ton of matrix activity, if I recall correctly), but I probably won't read the other two, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, that is, unless somebody sends them to me. But, if somebody were going to send me science fiction books, they could do worse than sending me some Philip K. Dick, who is probably the best crazy person to ever put ink to paper.

As a final note, Alex, if you are reading, you would love Philip K. Dick.