Neuromancer

Neuromancer is a science fiction novel by the American-Canadian writer William Gibson, published in 1984, and it was his debut. Its central figure is Case, a hacker hired by an artificial intelligence and a damaged ex-soldier for a robbery that matters a great deal to the people paying for it. It began the Sprawl trilogy, which continued with Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Case was one of the best console cowboys in the Sprawl until his employers burned his nervous system and cut him off from cyberspace, which he treats as worse than dying. He is drinking his way through Chiba City when a woman with surgically inset mirrorshades offers him a repair job with strings attached. She is Molly, an augmented mercenary working for a shadowy former military officer named Armitage.

The target is an artificial intelligence with plans of its own, and the people paying for the run are not the only ones with an interest in what it becomes. Case's repair depends on completing the job, and the artificial intelligence has been waiting for someone like him. Gibson writes the world densely, with the slang and the technology assumed rather than explained, so the reader assembles the setting from the characters' use of it.

Gibson had mainly written short stories before the novel, and its influences include the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and the comic art of Jean Giraud. The book establishes cyberspace, the Sprawl and the console cowboy, and it is the first of three novels in the same setting.