Neuromancer was groundbreaking in its time. I read it when it came out in 1984 and it blew me away.
These days so much other media has been influenced by it that it doesn't look nearly as original.
But just imagine reading it when there were no books or movies about:
- cyberspace inhabited by AIs
- neural interfaces
- corporate armies
- insanely rich people living in Earth orbit
- genetically engineered assassins with body augmentations
- slum-dwelling hackers who break in to corporate data stores
Neuromancer brought all this and more in to popular consciousness in a blinding flash.
After Neuromancer, Gibson came out with Count Zero (which I liked even more than Neuromancer itself) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (which wasn't nearly as good as either of the books that preceded it). I stopped reading Gibson after that.
I'm quite a bit younger than you, and not entirely clued up on cyberpunk and related genres, but I'd think "Blade Runner" (1982) and its source novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) brought many of the same/similar ideas to the fore a while earlier.
Neuromancer still sounds ground-breaking and I hope to read it one day.
As an aside - something interesting I just found was Gibson's thoughts on Blade Runner. He had seen the first 20 minutes of it and thought his book would be seen as a copy of the film. [1]
Edit: I uh finally read the article after spending ages in the comments and see that they mention this exact incident in there. Whoops.
Blade Runner was fantastic and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was ok, but they had neither neural interfaces nor cyberspace (nor the entities dwelling within it), which were pretty central to Neuromancer.
Neuromancer was influenced by both Blade Runner and DADoES, but it's not like it was a ripoff of either, neither in themes, nor characters, nor dialogue, nor plot. It was mostly influenced by these in style.
My favorites are the Bigend trilogy, especially the first, Pattern Recognition. It's like he decided the real word (in 2001) was science fictional enough.
These days so much other media has been influenced by it that it doesn't look nearly as original.
But just imagine reading it when there were no books or movies about:
- cyberspace inhabited by AIs
- neural interfaces
- corporate armies
- insanely rich people living in Earth orbit
- genetically engineered assassins with body augmentations
- slum-dwelling hackers who break in to corporate data stores
Neuromancer brought all this and more in to popular consciousness in a blinding flash.
After Neuromancer, Gibson came out with Count Zero (which I liked even more than Neuromancer itself) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (which wasn't nearly as good as either of the books that preceded it). I stopped reading Gibson after that.