Released in 1984, Neuromancer is a science fiction novel written by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. The novel is the first of 3 in the Sprawl trilogy which includes Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
The novel follows the life of Henry Case, a washed up hacker hired for one last job which brings him into contact with a powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute. The novel is set in a dystopian underwold of Chiba City, Japan. We are introduced to the “matrix”, a virtual reality dataspace, that has its roots in primitive arcade games.
Cyberspace is described as a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the ind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
The 1999 cyberpunk film “The Matrix” draws on concepts from Nueromancer like the usage of the term the “matrix.” The term cyberspace was applied to the Internet and world-wide web during their formations.
