Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer has one of my favourite opening lines of a SF novel. 'The sky was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel' manages to be evocative and futuristic, whilst also showing how technology has changed since the book was written. Instead of a fuzzy grey, a dead channel is now a nice, clear blue, so the line still works both ways. 

The novel is set in a dystopian near future, where nation states have been superseded by warring zaibatsu corporations conducting their business in cyberspace, most people eke out miserable lives in slums and shanty towns whilst the super rich live in orbital enclaves. The protagonist is a burned out hacker called Case, who has had his ability to jack into the matrix removed after a previous bungled assignment. He is hired by a mysterious patron called Armitage, a veteran of an assault on a Russian data centre, and aided by Molly Millions, a street samurai razor girl with permanently implanted mirror shades for eyes, and tasked with bringing down an AI with high grade Chinese virus software.

The opening section, summarised above, hooks you in with things that have now become established cyberpunk tropes - body mods, matrix hacking, cyberdecks - and hits you with new ideas at a dizzying rate. Apparently Gibson had started writing this book and almost gave up after seeing the opening scenes of Blade Runner because he thought that people would assume he was copying its style. Fortunately, he kept going, and this book, along with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash have become the foundational texts of the cyberpunk genre.

There are some bits that read awkwardly now - all of the dialogue for the Rastafarian character Maelcum - pilot of the space tug Garvey - who appears later in the book, is cringeworthy in the extreme. Some of the technical references feel slightly dated - Gibson didn't really know what a modem was, and he thought the 3 Megabytes of hot RAM was a lot. To be fair, the ZX81 computer that was roughly contemporaneous with this book only had 1K of RAM on a good day unless you splashed out for the wobbly 16K RAM pack. It also amused me to read about the implantable slivers of code call Microsofts in the book. Even if I were a cyberpunk, I'd probably think twice about sticking one of those in my cranium

In summary, this is a book that still holds up well, and still has much to say about the way that we relate to technology and AI in particular. It's telling that we've never managed to build a cyberspace that's as beguiling as the one in this book though.