Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer is a genre-defining novel by William Gibson. The plot follows a crime-connected hacker named Case. Case goes on a series of adventures in an attempt to release an AI called Wintermute. I know this is sci-fi canon, but I had a hard time following the plot. The narrator had something to do with it, and I'd like to go back and read it in hardcopy.

Key Takeaways

• AI Is going to be a very difficult problem. We can't predict all the possible outcomes, so we need to expect the unexpected.
• It seems unlikely we'll contain AI by physical means.

Memorable Quotes

• The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
• Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.
• Things aren't different. Things are things.
• His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
• When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.
• Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar- winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
• Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

Rating: 7/10
I can see why this book is appealing. Unfortunately it didn't draw me in like Snow Crash or Altered Carbon. As I said, the narrator had something to do with that. I'll try to read it on paper sometime soon so I better understand and follow what's going on in the early going.