William Gibson's first and highly acclaimed novel, Neuromancer (1984), established him as one of the most admired and influential writers of the 1980s. It also helped to popularise cyberpunk, a new literary sub-genre. Bruce Sterling in his preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) referred to Neuromancer as “the quintessential cyberpunk novel” whose fame relied on the depiction of a believably gritty future and the representation of cyberspace as a living space. However, the image of the future portrayed in Neuromancer had already been anticipated by three key films, all produced in 1982: David Cronenberg's Videodrome with its hallucinatory mass-media world; Steven Lisberger's Tron and its visualisation of cyberspace; and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner with its grim urban spaces. What Neuromancer achieved was to exploit the visual power and imagery of its predecessors for the...
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Citation: Rapatzikou, Tatiani. "Neuromancer". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 July 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10548, accessed 11 December 2025.]
