Neuromancer – Returning to the Origin of Cyberpunk

I don’t remember exactly when I first read Neuromancer. It must have been in Swedish translation, sometime in the early to mid-1990s, before I started reading almost exclusively in English. I later reread it in English perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, and most recently I returned to it in early 2025 after finally reading the rest of the Sprawl trilogy. Despite the book’s enormous influence on me, I was surprised by how little of the actual plot I remembered. In many ways, it felt like reading it again for the first time.

What lingered from those earlier readings were fragments and iconic moments rather than a coherent narrative: the heist against the Sense/Net headquarters to steal the ROM construct of McCoy “Dixie Flatline” Pauley, using a fabricated terrorist threat as a diversion; the tense encounters with and incursions through black ice; the strange, dreamlike quality of cyberspace itself. Even if the details had faded, it was immediately clear on rereading that Neuromancer had left a deep and lasting mark on how I think about technology, fiction, and the future — even if that influence is difficult to fully quantify.

At its core, Neuromancer follows Case, a washed-up hacker unable to access cyberspace after damaging his nervous system, who is pulled into a complex and dangerous job by shadowy employers. What initially appears to be a criminal caper slowly reveals itself to be something far stranger, involving artificial intelligences pushing against the limits imposed on them, fragmented identities, and questions about agency and consciousness. It’s a dense book, but also a remarkably cool one — full of momentum, style, and imagery that still feels potent decades later.

It was also William Gibson who led me onward to Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash, another mind-bending experience that deepened an already growing interest in consciousness and memes — long before “memes” became shorthand for internet jokes. That fascination was at least partially seeded by Neuromancer, with its ideas of information as something viral, contagious, and transformative.

Back then, I didn’t explore Gibson’s bibliography much beyond Neuromancer. I read The Difference Engine (co-written with Bruce Sterling) and Pattern Recognition, and I remember enjoying both, but neither left the same lasting imprint. Neuromancer stood apart — not just as a good novel, but as something foundational.

That foundation is hard to overstate. Neuromancer didn’t just define cyberpunk as a genre; it shaped how popular culture imagines the relationship between humans and computers. From the visual language of cyberspace to the idea of hacking as something immersive and embodied, its influence runs through books, films, and games alike. The Matrix is the most obvious descendant, but traces can be found everywhere: in anime like Ghost in the Shell, in games like Deus Ex, System Shock, and Cyberpunk 2077, and even in how we casually talk about “the Matrix” or “jacking in”. Gibson didn’t predict the future so much as provide it with a vocabulary.

For a long time, it felt impossible to imagine Neuromancer adapted for the screen. When I first read it, the technology and abstractions felt too strange, too internal, too conceptual. Then The Matrix arrived, and suddenly it seemed obvious that it could be done after all. More recently, watching The Peripheral — based on Gibson’s later novel — rekindled my interest in his work and reminded me just how adaptable his ideas can be. Having now reread the entire Sprawl trilogy, I find myself genuinely excited about the upcoming Neuromancer TV series.

So, is Neuromancer still relevant today? I think very much so. Some of the technology is dated, and the future it imagines is not the one we ended up with. But the strength of its vision, its cultural impact, and the fact that it remains a gripping and stylish story make it endure. More than anything, it still feels alive — and I can’t help but look forward to a new generation discovering cyberpunk, perhaps for the first time, through the world Gibson created.