Neuromancer

The jargon is the wall: ice, simstim, trodes, dropped without definition until early chapters read as close to incomprehensible, and readers report nearly quitting around the forty-page mark, one admitting “I had no flipping idea what was happening on a larger scale.” The impressionistic scene transitions jump location to location too fast to track geography or stakes. Supporting characters read thin, picking up contradictory details with no throughline, and some find the sexualized detail gratuitous. A cranky verdict recurs: historically important but “not a very good book” now that decades of imitators have absorbed its innovations, its edge “slightly diminished by the years.”