Neuromancer, Part I

Gibson’s Neuromancer begins with a great amount of action as we follow Case through an intricate winding of travel. Case’s movement from a run-down and rather sketchy bar to Julius Deane’s office where Wage’s intentions of murder are discussed, to being stalked on a walk home, and to the Chat where again Case is surrounded by many people. We can infer from description that Case is living in a grungy world, yet it obviously takes place in a far off time.

Much of part one takes place in the Ninsei neighborhood of Chiba City where prostitution and sketchy behavior flourishes. It is here that Case finds himself as a street hustler. The neon lights and high technological descriptions of Night City leads me to believe that the lines are blurred between cyberspace and reality for Case. Case finds himself in Japan, where there is not only an influx of chaos an people, but also of technology and crime. Following Case for a short amount of time in his daily life confirms this fact about criminal activity. In fact, Gibson refers to this place as a “techno criminal subculture magnet.”

Through Case, Gibson reveals to us information about the Matrix, a cyberspace world that Case has been excommunicated from, so to speak. It is explained that at one time Cast was a cyberspace cowboy “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (Gibson 5). Though Case’s ability to get into the Matrix is no longer available, the descriptions of his life are quite cyber aged. The reader is told of “bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.” These descriptions blur the lines between his past cyber life and his grungy current reality.