This is turning into the year of the reread for me. Normally I'm yearning to get the next new book in my sweaty paw, but at the moment it seems just too much like hard work. I haven't got it in me to break in new authors, the authors I like don't have anything out. I think it's partly because what I'm really in the mood for is a clutch of fast and furious and smart thrillers and i just can't find any. So let us regress to comfort reading! Yay cyberpunk dystopian urban neon nightmare!

I suppose the attraction here is that it is the quintessence, if not the very first example, of hard boiled crime merging seamlessly with science fiction, bringing the computer jocks and cloned ninjas and enhanced warrior women and immortal corporate fiefdoms to the down and dirty street-level grime and sleaze and cool that was always a vision of the present as refracted through our imagined future. At heart, Neuromancer is a heist novel, perhaps even a jailbreak and, heck, the bulk of it takes place in space. It's funny how we (or I, anyway) equate Gibson with films like the The Matrix or even Inception where our heroes battle it out in unreal environments, but, though crucial, cyberspace is minimally used as a setting, and Case's addiction to the fleshless sizzle of the matrix is only one aspect of the novel. Never forget Molly and her claws, or poor schizoid Corto, or monstrous Riviera, all broken and fractured psyches, all knocked down and built up and set running by god-like intelligences waiting to be born.

The prose is cut like crystal and surprisingly heavy for something that flows so fast. It's always a shock to find yourself halfway through a paragraph and suddenly wonder if you're reading a poem of some kind. Violence is swift and brief and brutal. There are passages of lingering horror, usually Riviera's grotesque visions, and others of sudden clarity or beauty. It's dated, because there's no wi-fi or tablets or touchscreen and nobody has phones, but it's still a sleek, shining novel of the eighties, of money and crime and technology churning and transforming and full of danger