Neuromancer

Neuromancer is an audiobook by William Gibson, narrated by Robertson Dean. The unabridged Audible edition runs 10 hrs 31 mins.

Publisher’s Summary

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Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most potent visions of the future.

Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case is ready for the adventure that upped the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

Neuromancer was the first fully-realized glimpse of humankind’s digital future—a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.

Audiobook Details

• Narrated by: Robertson Dean
• Length: 10 hrs 31 mins
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release year: 2011
• Audible category: Literature & Fiction / Classics / Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Listener Ratings

Neuromancer holds an average listener rating of 4.3/5 from 9524 Audible ratings.

On Audible, ratings for this title break down into narration performance and story separately:

• Performance (narration): 4.2/5
• Story: 4.3/5
• 5-star ratings: 56% of all ratings

What Audible Listeners Are Saying

3/5 stars — “5 stars for coolness, 3 stars for give-a-heckness”
This is a book that, if you are approaching it for the first time, suffers from having been imitated so much that it seems derivative of its own successors. Neuromancer was genre-defining and it blew a million little geeky minds back in the day, but reading it in 2012, I failed to be enthralled by the goshwow factor. ‘Cyberspace’ is mainstream now, and stripped away of the novelty that made fans back in 1984 say "This is so freaking cool!" the book is kind of a techy-tech high concept thrill ride with cardboard characters.

So, Case is a ‘cyberspace cowboy’ who used to "jack in" to the Matrix and go on ‘runs’ (stealing data from big corporations, governments, etc.) in a near-future where the U.S. has fragmented into tribal/corporate nation-states, but the USSR is still around. (In the foreword to this edition, Gibson comments on his own prescience or lack thereof, acknowledging also all the other things he didn’t get right which will strike modern readers, like the existence of payphones and the lack of cell phones.) He tried to steal from one of his employers, and in retaliation they poisoned him in a way that left him unable to jack into the matrix again. Now he’s a down-and-outer in Chiba City (yes, there’s a taste of 80s "Japan is so cool!" weeabooism here) when he gets recruited for a job by a mysterious guy named Armitage who says he can fix him up. Case also meets Molly, a "razor girl" street samurai. With the rest of his motley crew, Case goes on an adventure that takes him into high orbit to the playground of the super-rich. There are futuristic ninjas, artificial intelligences, and your basic cyberpunk RPG adventure. Again, not really fair to dismiss it like that, because this book invented cyberpunk RPGing and cyberpunk everything else, but unless you really love all things cyberpunk and/or Gibson, you may find, as I did, that Neuromancer just doesn’t quite live up to the hype it earned in 1984 with its Hugo and Nebula awards.

William Gibson’s writing is superbly clever and descriptive, and boy does he spin ideas. But this is the third book of his I’ve read, and while I appreciate his craft on a technical level, his stories just don’t do much for me. I don’t care about his characters.

For SF fans, this may be a good book to read to be familiar with, you know, the "seminal" works of the genre, but I just don’t feel compelled to go read the rest of the Sprawl trilogy.

— David, Audible listener

4/5 stars — “Not quite sure about this one”
This was the genesis of the "Cyberpunk" sub-genre of Sci-Fi, so I’m told. Well, to me this book was reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s more mediocre stuff. Think "Martian Time Slip" or "Valis", It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. As far as cyberpunk is concerned, the sub-genre has taken off and is world’s beyond this stuff. Most recently "Ready Player One" has taken kiddie-cyberpunk to a whole new level. For hardcore cyberpunk no one can top Neal Stephenson and "Snow Crash", or some of that dudes other stuff. But considering where this book originated from and when it was written, it deserves credit for being the forerunner of the cyberpunk.

Now the reader is another matter. The book probably would have been a whole lot better with another narrator. This guy was not very good, and I think he kind of ruined it.

— michael, Audible listener

3/5 stars — “Excellent ideas. Poor execution”
After listening to this audiobook it’s obvious that Neuromancer has been a source of inspiration to many other creatives in the field. Movies like the Matrix and also every cyberpunk anime in existence have borrowed heavily from this book. If you like those works this is required listening.

However, for all of it’s landmark ideas, this book seems poorly written. I haven’t read the book so perhaps its just the narration. Of the 30 some audiobooks I have listened to so far, this has by far been the most jarring, disjointed and hard to follow of them all. If you’re not into the genre, or the concepts it spawned, I would avoid it.

— rahnem, Audible listener

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