William Gibson, Neuromancer

I first read Neuromancer sometime between high school and college, when this guy (who gave me The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide--wrapped in a towel!--for my 17th birthday) recommended it. He claimed that most of The Matrix had been taken from it, uncredited, and that if I liked the latter, I should check it out. It was unlike anything I'd ever read, and there were definitely distinct echoes of The Matrix, but I don't really remember much at all, beyond a scene or two that stuck with me, about that first time.

Recently, however, as I've been reading a lot about cyborgs, Neuromancer keeps showing up. It's considered the grandfather of cyberpunk novels, so I thought I should revisit it. I'm glad I did (I'm much better equipped to critique the essays that reference it), but in all I was pretty underwhelmed. My main impression was that it was not nearly as well-written or absorbing as Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, which I had just read. The latter reads like a film; the former reads a bit more like the lines of characters that comprise the matrix and have to be deciphered. The real importance of the novel, though, I think, is that he's the one who imagined it.