1984 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. Case used to be a
hacker, but stole from the wrong people, and they took hacking away
from him; now he's a hustler on an arc towards suicide by street. But
someone wants him for a very special job.
This book is the model T of cyberpunk fiction: not the first,
arguably not the best, but very much the one that made it popular.
It's written to appeal to hyperactive suburban teenagers who want to
read about sex and drugs and being the coolest dude on the street.
Maybe you can't throw a football or run fast, but those computer
thingies, they'll be important one day, and then you can show them.
"Style over substance" was an unofficial motto of cyberpunk, and it's
strangely appropriate here. Everything's daubed with brand names and
nationalities that mean nothing but sound nifty. The core plot is the
expert hauled out of retirement for one last job, but every part of
that which can be folded into a different configuration has been: Case
is involuntarily retired because he screwed up, the team's heavy is a
woman and the team's seducer is a man, everything that happens is part
of a plot from a super-smart mastermind, and – obviously – nothing is
what it seems.
Except for Molly, the razorgirl with permanent mirrorshades and blades
in her fingertips, who comes over as the epitome of cool but she's all
vulnerable and emotional really. And she's happy to sleep with Case
but doesn't hang around and get all clingy, so that's all right.
(One can see the genesis of a thousand half-arsed
Strong Female Characters
right here.) And the other female characters are much worse.
But Gibson's problems with female characterisation aside, this is a
fast-paced romp that works well. Sure, I'm not fifteen any more, and
now I know that all the computer stuff was entirely invented by Gibson
because he didn't have a clue about it himself and didn't want to get
his story mired in reality. Like other influential books, it sometimes
seems samey, but that's in part because it's been so widely imitated,
often without any understanding of what actually made it work.
This is the sort of book that puts newcomers off science fiction: the
world is a puzzle, and little is explicitly explained. You need to put
together clues here and there to work out what's going on and even
what some of the words mean; but there's nothing that will seriously
challenge the experienced SF reader, or the obsessive. It's a
descendant of the New Wave that hides its trippiness just enough to
appeal to the mainstream fan. (Though if the whole thing turned out to
have been an hallucination as Case was dying of spiked drugs in a
Chiba back alley I wouldn't be surprised.)
Followed loosely by Count Zero, but there was no plan for a sequel,
and to my mind this is the best writing Gibson ever did. Reread for
Neil Bowers'
Hugo-Nebula Joint Winners Reread,
and this is one of the few books so far that comes close to the quality I
remember from first reading.
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