Neuromancer Glossary
Neuromancer (1984) is William Gibson’s first novel, written on a manual typewriter in his Vancouver apartment over the course of about a year. Gibson had been a short-story writer for the previous several years; Neuromancer was, by his own account, an attempt to write something book-length before he gave up trying. The book swept the science-fiction major awards in its publication year: the Hugo, the Nebula, the Philip K. Dick. It became, almost immediately, the founding novel of the cyberpunk genre and the touchstone the rest of the genre defined itself against.
For this Dictionary the most important detail is the term cyberspace, which Gibson coined for the book and which entered the broader English language through its pages: “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation… a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.” That definition is being lived inside, four decades later, by every operator running an agentic system on consumer hardware. The shape of Neuromancer’s world — corporate sovereignty, mediated subjectivity, AI as an actor with its own goals, the human body as the site of the bargain — is the shape the Dictionary’s Mediation (a la Gibson) essay treats as still operative.
Gibson’s later trilogy — The Peripheral, Agency, and the unfinished third volume — extends the Neuromancer setting into a far-future world after the Jackpot. The Aunties AI-oversight regime, the Lowbeer Question, and the broader Gibson-as-design-source argument all draw on the world Neuromancer opened.
See also
- Mediation (a la Gibson) — the Dictionary’s argument for Gibson as a design source
- The Peripheral — the Jackpot-trilogy novel that extends Neuromancer’s setting
- Jackpot
- Aunties
- Lowbeer Question