Reading Neuromancer for the First Time in 2025

I must confess, I had a confession to make until I started working at The Verge in 2016: Until I started working at The Verge, I’d never heard of William Gibson’s seminal 1984 novel. I was familiar with many of Neuromancer's themes: Cyberpunk and cyberspace, computer hacking, corporate espionage, cybernetic enhancements, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and near-future worlds populated with leather jacket-wearing murderous street punks. But I just didn’t know how many of these modern science fiction tropes first appeared or became prominent in the pages of William Gibson’s book.

I recently decided to read it for the first time. My reasons were twofold: Firstly, I wanted to get my year of distraction off to a good start by avoiding as much social media as humanly possible. Secondly, I want to read a lot more hardback books, specifically science fiction hardback books, and have bought a series of titles to do just that: A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K.Dick; Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky; and The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. But first and foremost on my list was Neuromancer.

I read it in a week. Lies of P's puppet punk is peak poetry and pointless zombies The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is literally the most memorable book I have ever read Neuromancer IS cyberpunk. It’s a 3am neon-lit smoky dive bar cocktail of science fiction—a gritty, technology-fueled vision of a rain-soaked dystopian near future. For someone with even a passing knowledge of sci-fi from the last 40 years, it’s all astonishingly familiar even from the moment you read the opening line, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”

Gibson isn’t the originator of the word cyberpunk—that honor goes to American author Bruce Bethke, who first used it for the title of his 1983 short story—and the word never once appears with the pages of Neuromancer. Yet Gibson’s novel has arguably shaped the entire cyberpunk genre more than any other book. If you’ve never read Neuromancer, you still know Neuromancer—even if you don’t know that you know it.

Despite its relatively short length by modern sci-fi standards, Neuromancer isn’t an easy read. Gibson introduces a lexicon of technological terms that I found visually jarring and don’t always make immediate sense—especially when describing the characters’ experience of cyberspace. Gibson’s tendency to splice seemingly random words together to form new ones (like the now obvious “cyber” and “space”) or repurpose existing terms in new ways (“slivers of Microsoft”—to be sure, Gibson is not describing Excel here) meant I often had to reread paragraphs, pages, or even entire chapters to grasp what was happening, particularly early on.

However, there may be a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with Gibson’s writing style. Back in my Verge days, I often used Lorem Gibson in feature layout mockups instead of the standard placeholder text, Lorem Ipsum. It felt fittingly Verge-y—a cyberpunk twist on meaningless, abstract design filler. Even though I hadn’t actually read any of his work at the time, I loved how Gibson’s words, stripped of any context, created a flow of abstract, tech-laden phrases.

When I finally sat down to read Neuromancer, I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences. Don’t believe me? Read this: “Cowboys didn’t get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn’t feel it.”

To be clear, Neuromancer makes perfect sense—if you take your time with it. In my case, that also meant taking notes. Even the more abstract passages all come together when read carefully, such as descriptions of someone trying to bypass seemingly abstract shapes and structures as they attempt to pierce esoteric security measures in Cyberspace. Or the seemingly anachronistic, 2001-esque creature comforts found in the middle of a space station.

But I’ll admit, it sometimes took me two or three tries to fully wrap my head around certain details. Yet, it’s not just the language. The real challenge of reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 is that large swaths of the book feel so familiar precisely because it was so original in 1984. That originality has been absorbed, sampled, and remixed so much it has degraded, like a cassette mixtape copied too many times, across decades of sci-fi movies, TV series, anime, and video games.

There are moments when the book reads like a greatest-hits collection of cyberpunk influences: The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, Elysium, Ready Player One, Strange Days, Alita: Battle Angel, Altered Carbon, Mr Robot, Black Mirror, Cowboy Bebop, and Cyberpunk 2077. Except Gibson did it first. One name not on this list is Blade Runner. The 1982 film, directed by Ridley Scott and based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, has been a major influence on the genre.

Gibson smartly avoids the Blade Runner incept date trap. Yet, aside from a few outliers here and there, the book feels like the near future, which makes reading it for the first time in 2025 both revelatory and slightly disorienting. On one hand, Neuromancer feels shockingly prescient and relevant. Gibson’s ideas about artificial intelligence are downright uncanny when considering when the book was written.

The same goes for virtual reality, though I’m not sure I want Meta Ray-Bans permanently wired to my face. On the other hand, some of the book’s omissions (cell phones and the lack thereof) and assumptions (massive space stations with atmosphere, beaches, and nightclubs) highlight just how difficult it is to extrapolate current technological trends accurately into the future, even for a visionary like Gibson.

Take, again, Neuromancer's very first line: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” I’m not as old as William Gibson. But I’m old enough to remember when changing the channel on a black-and-white TV meant using the dial to scroll through static-filled “dead channels.” But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981.

Gibson later admitted in an introduction to the book, “It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to.” But in the end, none of that really matters. Science fiction shouldn’t be about accurately predicting future technology; it's a narrative through which we focus on better understanding the human condition, free from the distraction of our current reality.

Conclusion

And if that’s the goal, Neuromancer is as relevant today as it was in 1984, if not more so. It may be hard to believe that a book written over thirty years ago can still feel so eerily prescient and relevant today. But Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk, but he defined it. He created the lexicon—cyberspace, matrix, sprawl—that shaped how we imagine our digital future.