Understanding Cyberspace

Published in 1984, Neuromancer follows Case, a washed-up computer hacker recruited for one last job: jacking into cyberspace, which William Gibson defined as "a consensual hallucination" of networked data shown as geometric space. Gibson wrote the entire novel on a manual typewriter, with almost no personal experience of computers.

He conceived cyberspace from watching teenagers absorbed in arcade games, their bodies forgotten as their attention merged with the screen. That observation, that humans would willingly trade physical reality for digital experience, proved prophetic beyond anything Gibson imagined.