Thumbs up for Neuromancer by William Gibson. Science fiction.
It is everything they say it is – world-changing, intensely creative, beautifully written, and so vividly described you feel like you’re watching a movie. But that aside, I like character-driven stories, and the main character, Case, might as well have been a disembodied camera eye for all his personality. We’re told that he gets angry a couple of times but I don’t buy it. The secondary characters, like Case’s badass compatriot Molly, are more interesting, but we’re firmly fixed in Case’s head so that’s negligible help. Add to that the sometimes-confusing plot and a perfectly-executed atmosphere of total humorlessness, and on the whole I found Neuromancer to be an admirable book rather than an entertaining one.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith’s security as though it didn’t exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across the polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object.
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