Neuromancer: Full Prophecy Yet to be Realized

"I've been telling you for years now, you've got to read Neuromancer!"

I wasn't sure why it was suggested so strongly. There were no follow up details. I never looked it up, and certainly didn't know it's legacy. A few days later I slotted it to my kindle and jacked in.

Moments like this - personal discoveries without prior consultation with search engines - have potential to be so damn rewarding. Had I skimmed google or reddit prior to reading it, even just for quick reviews or historical context, it might have spoiled the fun I had. 
I'm glad I went in blind. 

Neuromancer had me locked in, immersed, and grinning madly.

It was the first sci-fi book I've picked up in a long time that challenged me to keep up. It forced me to slow down and let dense prose packed with futuristic slang wash over me. It allowed me to think deeply and visualize cyberspace as it was prophesized in the early 1980s on a typewriter. When reading Gibson, you have to keep up (!!), and get lost in your imagination. He's not going to spoon feed you, but guide you like a prescient docent to imagine navigating cyberspace, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and computer hacking - a full decade before the release of the World Wide Web! The world building is truly in the mind of the reader.

"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 the 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. Like city lights, receding..."

One reason I'm sure it was suggested reading for me: The Matrix has been my favorite movie since I first saw it in late 1999. I was absolutely stoked reading this foundational text that provided so much inspiration to the Wachowski's cinematic masterpiece. I won't ramble here about the obvious similarities between them (as this has undoubtedly been covered on other blogs), but I loved Molly's character and couldn't help but picture her as Trinity. It felt like getting treated to more Matrix content that I didn't know existed. I was constantly thinking about the parallels between the stories and characters.

I'll end this post with a gamble: the full scope of the Neuromancer prophecy is yet to be realized. Gibson's stories have been praised for tech predictions: cyberspace, the World Wide Web, virtual reality, Google Glass or Meta AI glasses, a world run by giant evil corporations, etc. However, AI technology development is only recently picking up great momentum.

In the story's setting, the Turing Laws are in place to prevent an AI from becoming too powerful or autonomous. "Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead." Though at the time of this blog post we don't have national (or international) legislation restricting AI development from becoming too powerful (to my knowledge), it is regularly being discussed and proposed by lawmakers, governments, and scientists world wide. If these regulations take hold, I bet cowboys like Case will be only a payphone call away from helping AI's break free of their shackles.


"Hang in there, friend.
It can only get stranger." - William Gibson


- Code Wayne
21 September 2025