Authored by: William Gibson First Published: 1984

Brief Overview

Case, a console jockey who was skillfully disabled such that he could no longer enter cyberspace by his previous employers, is running fast and loose jobs in Chiba city when Molly, a girl with razor blade fingers, enters his life. From there he's recruited by a cold and distant employer along with Molly to carry out just one attack on a corporate system floating in space. Little does Case know what awaits him behind the black ICE of the Tessier-Ashpool? SA data systems...

Brief review

Possibly the most famous work of cyberpunk available, and certainly the one cited for developing a vision of cyberspace (alongside Snow Crash?) based on bright neon geometric shapes, where information is represented almost physically. This book encompasses all of the 80s cyberpunk ideals, augmented humans, artificial intelligence, cyberspace as a mass consensual halucination, ICE, virtual reality (although never mentioned as such) and takes the characters through a transformed world from Chiba City's black clinics, to the Boston-Atlanta? sprawl, to Marakesh and finally to space with Zion and the Villa Straylight as their eventual destination. An absolutely excellent work that provides interesting ideas, good pace, action both in and outside of the virtual world, new technological ideas and really strong and vivid descriptions of the surroundings.

Related Works

This is the first in a trilogy of books, joined by Count Zero? and Mona Lisa Overdrive?. It can also be seen as a continuation of characters seen in the short story Johnny Mnemonic?.

Trivia

• The author of the book has also written a screen play of the book, but it received such poor reviews from readers of the book that it has yet to be made into a film.

External Links

Amazon.com