# Neuromancer *Neuromancer* (1984) by [[William Gibson]] is the founding novel of cyberpunk and the book that popularized **cyberspace** (a word Gibson first coined in his 1982 story "Burning Chrome"). It swept the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards — the first novel to do so — and set the template for how a generation imagined the networked future. ## What it is The novel follows Case, a burned-out console cowboy hired for one last job, through a world of zaibatsu megacorporations, black-market biotech, and rogue artificial intelligences. Its "matrix" — a "consensual hallucination" of networked data jacked into directly by the human nervous system — became the dominant metaphor for "the net," echoing through *The Matrix* films and the marketing of real technology companies. Its AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer, scheming toward their own emancipation, prefigure today's [[AGI]] anxieties. ## Why it matters here *Neuromancer* gave Silicon Valley its cyberpunk vocabulary and noir aesthetic — cyberspace, the matrix, the hacker-protagonist, the corporate-feudal future — which the industry adopted while largely discarding the novel's anti-corporate critique. That selective inheritance is the pattern documented in [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]]. ## See also - [[William Gibson]] — the author - [[Snow Crash]] — the other foundational cyberpunk novel - [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] — the hub