Neuromancer is far more deserving of praise as a cultural milestone than a work of fiction. Yet let me suggest it's probably not such a bad thing the project, while supposedly still in the works, has yet to come to fruition. It's not hard to imagine why the book spent so long in development hell - you'd need a fair amount of money to do justice to what was something of an unproven property back then, and after the godawful, tone-deaf adaptation of Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic his relationship with Hollywood probably didn't get much better. There were a few abortive attempts at filming Neuromancer over the years: Gibson even wrote a pretty decent treatment of the novel himself. The man practically invented cyberpunk as a genre - that strange fusion of golden age sci-fi with the tropes of counterculture movements down the ages - and influenced countless authors with the sheer scope of his vision, the sense he'd laid down a template for a whole parallel reality as much as he'd written a novel that caught hold of your imagination. Of all the holy texts of classic science fiction, those books devoted nerds dream of seeing brought to the big screen, William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) has to be pretty high up the list. He cranks up the flame and is doing over a hundred when he blazes through some poor citizen's bobwire and crosses the Line. Cowboy has a steel guitar playing a lonesome cadenza somewhere in his mind. Ripe wheat straw flies out behind in a plume. Mental indicators climb their columns from blue to green to orange. The beast roars like the last lonely dinosaur and trembles as it gains way. Through his sensors he can taste the exhaust and see the sky and the prairie sunset, and part of his mind can feel the throbbing radio energies that are the enemy's search planes, and it seems to him that the watchers and the escort vehicles are suddenly lessened - he will be taking the panzer over the Line, and they will not. Flaming corn-alcohol throbs through chest like blood and the shrieking exhaust flows from his lungs like breath, his eyes beam radar and his fingers can flick missiles forth like pebbles.
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