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Forty years on, Neuromancer arrives with so much accumulated reputation that the actual experience of reading it can feel almost beside the point. This is the book that gave us the word cyberspace, that swept the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick award in a single pass, and that hardwired the look and grammar of cyberpunk into everything from The Matrix to Deus Ex to Ghost in the Shell. The shadow it casts is so long that the novel underneath has to fight to be seen on its own terms. What I found, coming back to it, is that the legend and the book are two slightly different things, and the gap between them is where the interesting reading happens.

The plot, such as it is, follows Case, a washed-up console cowboy whose nervous system was deliberately burned out by former employers he tried to cheat. Stranded in the body he once treated as meat to be escaped, he is patched back together and recruited for a heist he only partly understands, alongside Molly, a mirror-eyed street samurai with retractable blades under her fingernails and easily the most magnetic presence on the page. Behind them looms Wintermute, an artificial intelligence maneuvering toward something its human pawns cannot quite perceive. Calling this a story is generous. It is better described as an experience that happens to have a plot threaded through it, and the experience is the point.

Gibson does not explain his world. He drops you into it mid-sentence and expects you to swim, withholding the meanings of his slang and his acronyms and trusting that the texture will accrete into sense. For some readers this is the novel's great pleasure; for others it is a wall. I will not pretend the difficulty is imaginary. The opening hundred pages can feel like reading a language with only a passing resemblance to English, and more than one passage demands a second look before it yields. There were stretches where the prose, dense with invented jargon, became something my eye slid across rather than absorbed. The famous opening line about a sky the color of a dead channel is electric; not every sentence that follows earns the same wattage.

And yet the craft is undeniable, even when the comprehension lags. Where lesser writers drown their world-building in exposition, Gibson keeps the narrative lean and moving, never stopping to lecture. The skill it takes to make that much invented terminology feel native rather than clumsy is easy to underestimate. Night City is rendered as a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, and the description lands because Gibson trusts the image to do the work. The writing is gritty, propulsive, frequently beautiful, with a noir sensibility that owes as much to the hardboiled tradition and to Blade Runner's neon murk as it does to anything in the science fiction canon.

The novel's biggest liability is also its origin story. So much of what felt visionary in 1984 has since become the wallpaper of our actual lives that a first-time reader today risks the strange disappointment of the original being out-copied by its imitators. The future Gibson built has the curious quality of running on technology that already feels analogue, a world of payphones and data on physical media imagined by someone who, famously, had never touched a computer when he wrote it. There are odd blind spots, the absence of anything resembling a mobile phone among them, that reveal the limits of even an extraordinary act of extrapolation. The fetishised vision of Japan as the engine of the future is very much a product of its decade.

The characters, too, are a fair target. Case is the prototype of the disaffected anti-hero, and prototypes are rarely the most fully realized version of a thing. Most of the supporting cast sit somewhere below the moral waterline, and a reader looking for people to care about will find slim pickings beyond Molly. Whether that bloodlessness is a flaw or a deliberate feature of the cold world Gibson is describing is a question the book leaves open.

So is Neuromancer the masterpiece its reputation insists upon? Not quite, and not in the way the reputation suggests. It is a strange, prickly, sometimes frustrating book whose ideas have proven more durable than its storytelling. But its craft is real, its influence beyond serious dispute, and its best passages still crackle. Read it not as scripture but as a brilliant, flawed origin point, and you will feel no shame in the time spent. Just be prepared to work for it.