S/R 2

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is as much a philosophical trip through the implications of technology merging with the human experience as it is a riveting tale of crime and cyberspace. Broken into 5 distinct acts, the novel opens with extensive groundwork being laid for character construction. Case, our protagonist, is described as an exceptionally talented cyberthief who attempted to steal from his employer and got caught, driving his employer to poison Case with a toxin that wipes out his ability to jack in to cyberspace. The second and third of the five sections proceeds to detail the assembly of the team involved in the coming mission. This team includes Molly, Case's extensively modified partner in crime, Armitage, Case's unstable new boss and beneficiary, Peter Riviera, the psychopathic hologram-projector, and McCoy Pauley, a now-deceased cyberspace operator who was transferred into a ROM. The fourth and largest section is a series of shorter chapters detailing the actual mission embarked upon by the team. All of the action in this mission takes place on Freeside, a world unto itself, manufactured by the Tessier-Ashpool family, separate from planet Earth. On the mission, we are introduced to this corporate-structured family, and it is revealed that they are behind not only one but two different artificial intelligence entities in the novel, Wintermute and Neuromancer, both of whom are striving to combine, which turns out to be the reason for the team's mission – retrieve a password and allow the AIs to merge. Climactic scenes, involving battles, deaths, misunderstandings, and revelations abound in these short chapters, which end with Wintermute and Neuromancer taking the steps necessary to combine, but not before Armitage’s psychotic break and death, the erasing of the McCoy Pauley construct, a broken leg for Molly, and Riviera's death. The final of the five sections simply details the mission’s aftermath – within it, Molly leaves Case, Case speaks with the new combined AI, and it is revealed that Case has returned back to work he was doing before the mission, bringing the story full circle, as if the mission never happened.

Amidst the twists and turns of the plot, Gibson frequently returns to several themes he presents throughout the book, the most important of which is identity, especially when represented by two parts, ideas, entities, or concepts. Gibson poses the question of whether or not we can successfully merge two parts in order to create a greater whole – and he works to answer this question with countless examples, ranging from technology and humanity, to cyberspace and reality, to family and corporation, to Wintermute and Neuromancer, to Tessier and Ashpool, to power and emotion. In every single case that Gibson presents, the merge cannot happen without one of these original entities being destroyed upon combination – a universality that Gibson works skillfully to manufacture, but fails to, simply because reality disagrees with Gibson’s presentation of these mergers. We live in a world of augmentation, and our cultural identities are often not only informed by a duality of influences, but by a large multiplicity of influences, the number growing every day. This augmentation reaches beyond our identities as well, manifesting itself in countless ways throughout our lives, in technological streamlining, media convergence, and throughout history. People and ideas evolve but it rarely takes the destruction of who they were or what the idea began as in order to put that change into effect. The reality we live in is saturated with successful partnerships, innovative marriages of technology and theory, and other dualities at every turn. Gibson is fascinated with human nature and its destructive tendencies, especially when presented with opposition or change, but he ignores our absolutely magnificent ability to adapt, incorporate and progress. In a world where marriage exists, corporations merge, multiracial people connect equally with their multiple backgrounds, and segregation is slowly becoming a convention of the past, one thing is clear: change can occur without destruction.