That being said, I need to finish the Dune series first. On ‘Children of Dune’ now. Can’t remember if that’s the 3rd or 4th book in the series, but I’m about 100 pages away from the next.

Just got around to listening to the latest book club episode. If anyone wants to play that Neuromancer adventure game, it is available on abandonia.com. I tried it briefly, it was not easy. Also, the closest we ever got to a live action Neuromancer film was not Hackers, it was in fact Johnny Mnemonic, which is based off of the short story about how Molly Millions ends up being a street samurai in the first place. There has been talk of a big budget adaptation since last year or so, with Liam Neesom And Mark Wahlberg attached to it. Here is some alleged concept art: http://io9.com/5932374/first-concept-art-for-the-neuromancer-movie

It’s one of those books that drops you in the middle of everything with the bare minimum of explanation or exposition. In that sense, I could see it being quite difficult for a lot of general public readers to get into. If you’re into the genre, the hook will be enough to keep you reading, but if not the crime drama might be enough to keep you following until you can start to understand what’s going on. As I near the end, I am actually also looking forward to reading it again and seeing what I can pick up in the beginning that didn’t seem to make sense at the time.

Have to agree with you two, since this was really the first time I’ve delved into cyberpunk at all I kinda felt like I got dropped off in a strange city with no clue as to where I was. I’ve been meaning to read it a second time, since I powered through it in about 4 1/2 hours, but I’ve been swamped with other things.

Overall, I have to say I enjoyed the book. Definitely ahead of its time, it often reads like it was written in the mid-90’s for the concepts involved, though there are some notable anachronisms that can disrupt suspension of disbelief if they bother you. Gibson seems oddly prescient for some of the concepts involved, while others seem, today, outright outlandish. I do like when authors, within reason, trust their readers to be smart enough to figure things out without a great deal of exposition, especially at the onset, like this book. Just as a surface read, accepting the story as it goes, it is pretty good. When you take time to ponder on it, though, and think about some of the concepts and their associated implications, you get some good fridge logic/horror moments out of it. Copies of consciousness, for instance, and super-AI issues brings to memory some parallel concepts as “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

As an aside, the Turing Police drew a lot of fascination from me, and I started wondering what a book about them, from their point of view, would be like.

I’ve started a re-read, just to see what pops that I didn’t understand from being dropped into the middle last time.

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/1041/Neuromancer.html