Neuromancer
By William Gibson

I read Gibson's most famous and influential novel when it came out here in the mid-1980's. This is the third time I've read it but I forgot so much of it over the intervening years. Not Molly though: she managed to stick around, for obvious reasons. A woman with mirror lenses for eyes and retractable razors under her fingernails is not someone you forget!

For something written before the internet spread far and at the very birth of the digital networking and personal computer age the novel has really stood the test of time in my opinion. Some of it might feel a little archaic, and it is still unclear to me what Case actually does when he "jacks" in to the cyberworld. This fancy separate and virtual space made real had a huge impact on culture and not just science-fiction. I see a lot of Gibson in the noir, hard-boiled and violent trilogy Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan for instance (re-read not long ago). The prose is tight and the story moves quickly. Today, we are not quite living in the world of the Sprawl and Straylight, our digital "assistants" are short of Wintermute (so far) but I feel (or fear) we are getting there. There's a poetry to the artificial world conjured up by AI but it's a dreamworld and one you want to be able to wake up from.

I'll need to re-read the two other books that make up this "Sprawl" trilogy. Lesser books, if I recall, but he's an author worth reading, and re-reading sometimes.