From the publisher
SPECIAL 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION — THE MOST IMPORTANT AND INFLUENTIAL SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL OF THE PAST TWO DECADES
Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene—it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.
Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society. Neuromancer's virtual reality has become real. And yet, William Gibson's gritty, sophisticated vision still manages to inspire the minds that lead mankind ever further into the future.
From the critics
Rolling Stone Magazine:
Gibson has revitalized science fiction as no other single force in a generation.
Publishers Weekly:
William Gibson fans will welcome the 20th-anniversary edition of Neuromancer, the SF novel that launched cyberpunk and anticipated the Internet age. Gibson provides a new introduction, "The Sky Above the Port." Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Synopsis
Neuromancer is the multiple award-winning novel that launched the astonishing career of William Gibson. The first fully-realized glimpse of humankind's digital future, it is a shocking vision that has challenged our assumptions about our technology and ourselves, reinvented the way we speak and think, and forever altered the landscape of our imaginations.
Now, for the first time, Ace Books is proud to present this groundbreaking literary achievement in a new trade paperback edition.
Winner of science fiction's "Triple Crown"—the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards.
Includes the special afterword Gibson wrote for the 10th anniversary hardcover edition published by Ace.
About the Author
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American author, mostly of science fiction novels, who lives in Canada. He is one of the leading members of the cyberpunk movement.
Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, USA. In 1968, he moved to Canada, and in 1972, he settled in Vancouver, B.C., where he began to write science fiction and has spent his adult life. His early works are generally futuristic stories about the influences of cybernetic and cyberspace (computer simulated reality) technology on the human race living in the imminent future. His '80s fiction, especially, has a noir, bleak feel. His first novel, Neuromancer, won three major science-fiction awards (Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Memorial Award).
More recently, Gibson has begun to move away from the fictional dystopias that made him famous, toward a more realist style of writing, eschewing his trademark jump-cuts in favour of continuity and narrative flow. The novel Pattern Recognition even saw him enter the mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. There is, however, still the focus on technological change, and in particular on its darker, less predictable social consequences.
In addition to his paper works, he also wrote an electronic poem called "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)" in 1992, and flirted with writing a weblog from January to September 2003. Gibson had also written a highly anticipated treatment of Alien 3, few elements of which ever found their way into the ultimate film.
Despite all these, Gibson never had a special relationship with computers. In fact, he only recently started using e-mail.
