Books — Consumed

1984 · William Gibson

Neuromancer hits different when you realize Gibson wrote it on a typewriter before the internet existed. The book follows Case, a washed-up hacker who gets pulled into a conspiracy involving AI, corporate warfare, and a heist in cyberspace. What makes it work isn't just the plot but Gibson's ability to write texture into technology. The Sprawl feels lived-in, the tech feels tangible, and the prose has this clipped, almost poetic rhythm that makes dense ideas move fast.

The world-building is what sticks. Gibson doesn't explain everything, he just drops you into this future where technology has fused with culture in ways that feel inevitable. The matrix, razor girls, Turing police, it all functions as shorthand for a complete universe. The book doesn't age because it was never really about predicting technology, it was about understanding how technology changes the texture of human experience.

What's remarkable is how much influence this single book had. It won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards in the same year, and basically every piece of cyberpunk media since owes something to it. The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner 2049, they all trace back here. Gibson created a vocabulary for talking about digital space that we're still using forty years later.