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Background of the Study William Gibson is a Canadian Science Fiction author with a crazy talent to prophesize the internet’s future. Not actually, but he came pretty close with “Neuromancer”.
Gibson’s writing style includes short, descriptive sentences that are able to gather the best angles to view and perceive action through writing. Gibson also is able to make characters that feel fictional and realistic through the way he humanizes them in his stories.
In “Neuromancer”, William Gibson created new meanings for tech-y words like “matrix” and “cyberspace”. We constantly use these words today, but Gibson was able to create the context and story that allows us to visualize what matrices and cyberspaces are.
Literature Review
Twenty-four year-old Henry Dorsett Case was a talented computer hacker before he stole from his employers. In response, they maimed him by injecting a mycotoxin into his central nervous system. It rendered him incapable of inserting his consciousness into the cyberspace known as the matrix. After a year of visiting illegal clinics and unsuccessfully finding a cure, Case is now a depressed, drug-addicted, borderline suicidal hustler in the futuristic metropolis of Chiba City, Japan.
Molly, a mercenary who works for an enigmatic ex-military leader named Armitage, approaches Case. Armitage has promised to correct Case’s neural damage if he agrees to do a hacking job. Excited at the prospect of getting back into cyberspace, Case agrees to do the job without knowing all the details about it or much about his new boss.
As payment for curing Case, Armitage gives an illegal clinic the technology to perform the procedure. Unbeknownst to Case, Armitage arranges for small sacs of the same mycotoxin that maimed him to be placed in Case’s bloodstream. Armitage later tells Case that if the job is completed on time, he will arrange for the poison to be removed. Otherwise the sacs will erupt, crippling his nervous system once again. Armitage also instructs the clinic to give Case a new pancreas and graft a special tissue to his liver, leaving Case unable to break down illegal drugs. This effectively cures Case’s drug addiction.
While Case and Molly have a working relationship, they also begin a sexual relationship. Molly has reservations about Armitage and tells Case to look into his background. The couple travels to New York to complete the first part of the job. They are supposed to break into the vaults of the media corporation Sense/Net and steal a computer storage device containing the saved consciousness of one of Case’s mentors, the legendary hacker McCoy Pauley. Case plants a virus in the Sense/Net network while Molly works with a street gang called the “Panther Moderns,” who simulate a terrorist attack. This allows Molly to get into the building and steal the storage device.
Case and Molly investigate Armitage and find out he is really Colonel Willis Corto, a member of a failed military operation that tried to attack Soviet computer systems from an airplane. The operation went horribly wrong. Corto was the only survivor, and he needed extensive medical treatment and reconstructive surgery for his injuries. Corto also suffered a mental breakdown after the operation. He was last known to work in the criminal underworld.
Molly and Case also discover that Armitage works for a powerful artificial intelligence named Wintermute that was created by the wealthy Tessier-Ashpool family. The family is run like a corporation and uses cloning and cryogenic stasis to guarantee that the same members of the family are always in control. The Tessier-Ashpool family live in Villa Straylight, a mansion located in Freeside, an orbital space habitat that is also a resort getaway for the rich.
At Armitage’s instruction, the team travels to Istanbul to recruit Peter Riviera, a sadistic performer and drug addict who is able to project holograms using his implants. Whatever Riviera imagines, you see. Armitage convinces him to do a job for him. The team heads to Freeside. Molly buys enough drugs to supply Riviera’s expensive habit while they are at the resort colony.
While Case is jacked into the matrix, along with Pauley’s consciousness, Wintermute contacts Case directly and tells him that it (Wintermute) is one half of a super artificial-intelligence built by the Tessier-Ashpool family, and that it needs to merge with its other half, Neuromancer. The law bans both the construction and the merging of super AIs, so Wintermute has put together the team, led by Armitage, to achieve its goal. Case and Pauley’s job is to launch a powerful virus to break the barriers around the government and Tessier-Ashpool’s cyber locks while Riviera forms a close relationship with Lady 3Jane, the family’s current thawed clone leader. He needs to convince her to give Molly access into Villa Straylight. Molly’s job is to get a password from Lady 3Jane, a password that must be spoken into a terminal at the same time the virus breaks the cyberspace barriers.
As Molly and Riviera gain access to Villa Straylight, the Turing Police, the law enforcement branch in charge of monitoring artificial intelligence, arrest Case. Wintermute manipulates several machines and computers to kill the officers, allowing Case to escape. Under the stress of the job, Armitage begins to suffer another mental breakdown. He begins to believe that he is back in his military operation. Wintermute kills Armitage and tells Case that it knows how to remove the poison sacs from his blood, but first Case must finish the job.
Things also go awry inside Villa Straylight. Riviera betrays the team, and he and Lady 3Jane capture Molly. Case and his pilot, Maelcum, go into the mansion to help Molly, but Case is tricked into jacking into a program controlled by Neuromancer, who reveals that it does not want to join with Wintermute. Case escapes the program with Maelcum’s help and confronts Riviera, Lady 3Jane and her ninja bodyguard, Hideo.
Having grown tired of Riviera, Lady 3Jane has Hideo protect Case when Riviera tries to kill him. Riviera blinds the ninja, unaware that Hideo can perform as well in dark as he can in light due to years of practice. As Riviera tries to get away from the ninja, Molly tells them that Riviera is already dead because she has poisoned his drugs. They are already slowly killing him.
Case convinces Lady 3Jane to speak the password into the terminal and Wintermute and Neuromancer merge. The AI provides the cure to the poison in Case’s blood, and all parties are paid well for their work. The integrated AI erases all evidence of its crime and starts looking for other entities like itself. It contacts Case for the last time after the job and tells him that it has picked up transmissions from another AI in the Centauri system of space.
After the job, Molly leaves Case. He moves back to the Sprawl area of Chiba City, finds a new girlfriend and starts doing hacking work again.
https://www.pluggedin.com/book-reviews/neuromancer/
Significance of Study
Matrix: The Prophetic Fear of the Internet and Cyberspace
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=983#:~:text=%22Cyberspace.%20A%20consensual,city%20lights%2C%20receding.
We are thrown into the world where people jack into a matrix (long before the internet was even a thought in the public’s eye) and Artificial Intelligences run companies, but are trapped by their own programming.
Gibson creates a vivid, dangerous world, that may have seemed impossibly bizarre back in 1984, but in today’s day and age is very recognizable, even if things have not come to pass (yet) the way Gibson imagined them.
We are thrown into the world where people jack into a matrix (long before the internet was even a thought in the public’s eye) and Artificial Intelligences run companies, but are trapped by their own programming.
Gibson creates a vivid, dangerous world, that may have seemed impossibly bizarre back in 1984, but in today’s day and age is very recognizable, even if things have not come to pass (yet) the way Gibson imagined them.
https://themindreels.com/2019/07/17/neuromancer-1984-william-gibson/
References:
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=983#:~:text=%22Cyberspace.%20A%20consensual,city%20lights%2C%20receding.