About This Book
William Gibson invented the future. Not metaphorically—he literally coined the word cyberspace, imagined the architecture of networked global information before the internet existed, and described the texture of a world dominated by corporate power, technological augmentation, and the blurring of physical and digital reality with an accuracy that feels less like prediction than memory. Case is a washed-up hacker living in the sprawl of a near-future Tokyo, hired for one last job that will take him deeper into the matrix than anyone has gone. Gibson does not explain his world; he drops you into it and trusts you to swim. I came away from this book feeling I had seen something true about where we were heading, and I have spent the years since watching that vision arrive, piece by piece, exactly as described.
Gibson's digital noir makes a perfect companion to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which asks similar questions about authenticity and consciousness from the analog side of the divide.