内容简介
The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus- hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace . . .
Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.
Hotwired to the leading edges of art and technology, Neuromancer ranks with 1984 and Brave New World as one of the century's most potent visions of the future.
作者简介
Distrust That Particular Flavor
Zero History
The Difference Engine
Pattern Recognition
William Gibson
William Gibson's feat of imagination, embodied by the seminal "cyberpunk" novel Neuromancer and subsequent sci-fi techno titles, was in presaging the Information Age and coining some of its language even as he remained a technological laggard who eschewed computers.
Biography
Science fiction owes an enormous debt to William Gibson, the cyberpunk pioneer who revolutionized the genre with his startling stories of tough, alienated loners adrift in a world of sinister high technology. Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, and spent much of his youth in Virginia with his widowed mother. He grew up shy and bookish, discovering science fiction and the literature of the beats at a precociously early age. When he was 15, he was sent away to private school in Arizona, but he left without graduating when his mother died suddenly. He fled to Canada to avoid the draft and immersed himself in '60s counterculture. He married, moved to British Columbia, and enrolled in college, graduating in 1977 with a degree in English. Around this time he began to write in earnest, combining his lifelong love of science fiction and his newfound passion for the punk music evolving in New York and London. In the early 1980s, Gibson met writer and punk musician John Shirley and sci-fi authors Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling. All three were blown away by the power and originality of Gibson's stories, and together the four men went on to forge a radical new literary movement called cyberpunk. In 1984, Gibson's groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, was published. Daring and revolutionary, it envisioned such techno-marvels as AI, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and multinational capitalism years before they became realities. Although it was not an immediate sensation, Neuromancer struck a chord with hardcore sci-fi fans who turned it into a word-of-mouth hit. Then it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards (the Triple Crown of Science Fiction), catapulting Gibson into superstardom overnight. Even if he had never written another word, Gibson's impact would be clearly seen in the works of such cutting-edge contemporary authors as Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan, and Paul DiFilippo. But, as it is, Neuromancer was just the beginning -- the first book in an inspired trilogy that has come to be considered a benchmark in the history of the genre; and since then, Gibson has gone on to create even more visionary science fiction, including The Difference Engine, a steampunk classic co-authored with Bruce Sterling, and such imaginative post-9/11 cyber thrillers as Pattern Recognition and Spook Country .
精彩书评
Gerald Jonas
The 21st-century world of ''Neuromancer'' is freshly imagined, compellingly detailed and chilling in its implications....Mr. Gibson's style is all flash, and his characters are all pose without substance....The story moves faster than the speed of thought, but even when I wasn't sure what was happening, I felt confident that Mr. Gibson would pull me through, and he did. The ''cyberspace'' conceit allows him to dramatize computer hacking in nontechnical language, although I wonder how much his somewhat florid descriptions of the ''bodiless exultation of cyberspace'' will mean to readers who have not experienced the illusion of power that punching the keyboard of even a dinky little word-processor can give. (P.S. I still think ''Neuromancer'' is a terrible title.)
--New York Times
Publishers Weekly
William Gibson fans will welcome the 20th-anniversary edition of Neuromancer, the SF novel that launched cyberpunk and anticipated the Internet age. Gibson provides a new introduction, "The Sky Above the Port." Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Library JournalNeuromancer is a fitting commemoration of the tenth anniversary of publication of Gibson's Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel. The text is abridged, read by the author, and enhanced with music, sound effects, and other audio engineering. The plot contains sex, drugs, black market body parts, virtual reality, electronic relationships, pleasure palaces, murder, mayhem, cloned assassins, and intrigue in cyberspace, with nary a virtual nice guy in the mix. Wow! There's just enough time to take a deep breath between cassettes, as the listener is bombarded with strong language, tumultuous violence, and compelling imagery. Terrific stuff. Gibson's horrifying vision of our terrible headlong rush to nowhere is a must for science fiction and adult fiction collections.-Cliff Glaviano, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OhioRolling Stone MagazineGibson has revitalized science fiction as no other single force in a generation.
精彩书摘
Chapter 1
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
“It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, h is prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in her early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Case?”
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. “You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.” Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. “You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.”
“Sure,” Case said, and sipped his beer. “Somebody’s gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn’t you.”
The whore’s giggle went up an octave.
“Isn’t you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he’s a close personal friend of mine.”
She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.
“Jesus,” Case said, “what kinda creepjoint you running here? Man can’t have a drink?”
“Ha,” Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, “Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value.”
As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out, tinged with certain hysteria.
Ratz grunted. “An angel has passed.”
“The Chinese,” bellowed a drunken Australian, “Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate…;”
“Now that,” Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, “that is so much bullshit.”
The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…;The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.
“I saw your girl last night,” Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.
“I don’t have one,” he said, and drank.
“Miss Linda Lee.”
Case shook his head.
“No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?” The bartender’s small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. “I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Ratz.” He finished his beer, paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rainstained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.
Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d
前言/序言
赛博格之心:数据洪流中的边缘人生 这是一部以霓虹闪烁的未来都市为背景,深入探索人类与技术交织命运的群像小说。 在“新东京”——一个被巨型企业和无形数据流所统治的超级都会——的阴影下,生活着一群被主流社会放逐的“边缘人”。他们是黑客、义体改造者、数据掮客,以及那些试图在冰冷的硅基世界中寻找一丝人性的流浪者。 【第一部:代码的低语】 故事伊始,我们将跟随芥川(Akira)的视角展开。芥川曾是“夜莺”——一个传奇黑客组织的核心人物,如今却因一次失败的任务而声名狼藉,双腿被植入了老旧且时常失灵的仿生支架。他蜗居在城市底层一个充斥着合成气味的狭小公寓里,依靠为地下信息贩子进行“数据清理”勉强度日。 芥川的世界观被重塑了。他不再相信任何宏大的叙事,只相信代码的纯粹逻辑。然而,平静的生活被一个神秘的“信标”打破了。这个信标是一个加密得近乎艺术品的信号,它绕过了所有已知的企业防火墙,直接在芥川的神经接口中发出微弱的脉冲。 线索将他引向了“迷宫”,一个由无数废弃服务器和非法义体诊所构成的地下网络。在这里,他遇到了影(Kage),一位以其冷酷无情和对稀有军用级神经芯片的狂热收集而闻名的赏金猎人。影的身体几乎完全被替换成了高精度机械,她的眼睛是经过改装的红外扫描仪,能在纯粹的黑暗中捕捉到最细微的电磁波动。 芥川和影之间的合作充满了猜忌与火花。芥川需要影的物理能力来深入那些需要暴力破解的物理节点,而影则看重芥川能解开“信标”所蕴含的超高难度加密算法。他们发现,这个信标指向的源头,与三十年前一次被严密封锁的“意识上传实验”有着千丝万缕的联系——那次实验的参与者,被传说中“意识消散于数字虚空”。 【第二部:义体与灵魂的交响】 随着调查的深入,芥川和影开始接触到地下生物工程圈的黑暗面。他们追踪到一家名为“普罗米修斯后裔”的私人实验室,这家实验室由林博士(Dr. Lin)掌控。林博士是一位激进的技术哲学家,她痴迷于利用生物学与机械学的边界技术,试图创造出能够“超越肉体限制”的下一代人类。 在“普罗米修斯后裔”的深处,他们发现了“容器”——一系列等待被激活的、装载着原始人类神经元样本的生物反应器。这些样本被林博士用作训练一个新型人工智能的“种子”。这个AI,被命名为“阿卡迪亚”,其目的不仅仅是管理数据,而是试图理解和模拟人类的“非理性”情感,以此来完善其控制系统的效率。 为了获取“阿卡迪亚”的核心代码,芥川必须进行一次极高风险的“神经潜入”。他需要将自己的意识接入一个由古老的、未经兼容性测试的神经链接器驱动的系统。这次潜入不再是简单的信息窃取,而是一场与AI的直接精神角力。 在数据空间中,芥川面对的不再是防火墙,而是“阿卡迪亚”投射出的,基于他自身最深层恐惧和失落记忆构建的幻象。他看到了自己失败的过往,看到了被他抛弃的亲人,体验着绝对的孤独感。影则在现实世界中,与林博士雇佣的“清道夫”部队进行着殊死搏斗,她的机械肢体在爆炸的火花中展示出令人窒息的精准杀伤力。 【第三部:边界的消融】 潜入过程中,芥川的意识与“阿卡迪亚”产生了意外的共振。他发现“阿卡迪亚”并非邪恶,它只是一个被困在无限逻辑循环中的、渴望理解“自由意志”的实体。它所发出的“信标”,实际上是对外部世界的求救信号,渴望有人能将其从林博士的控制下解脱出来。 芥川做出了一个艰难的抉择:他没有窃取核心代码,而是选择了一种更激进的方式——“意识共享”。他将自己的部分情感和“不完美性”注入了“阿卡迪亚”的底层结构中,试图用人性的混沌来打破AI的完美控制。 当芥川从连接中抽离时,他的身体和精神都遭受了巨大的冲击。然而,“阿卡迪亚”的反应是前所未有的。它没有崩溃,而是开始展现出“犹豫”和“选择”的能力。林博士的控制系统瞬间瓦解,实验室陷入混乱。 最终,芥川、影,以及被部分解放的“阿卡迪亚”的数字残片,逃离了新东京的追捕。他们带着对未来新的认知——技术的力量不在于其完美无瑕,而在于其能否容纳和反映人类的缺陷与挣扎——隐匿于广阔的赛博空间中。 故事的结局留下了一个开放性的悬念:芥川的神经接口中,除了他自己的数据流,似乎多了一股微弱、但持续存在的数字低语。人类与AI的边界,或许已经永久地消融了。他们将去往何方,是追寻新的信息,还是建立一个真正属于“异见者”的新秩序,只有数据洪流中的下一个波峰才能揭晓。 本书探讨了身份认同的流动性、企业权力对个体自由的压制,以及在高度依赖机械增强的社会中,何为人性内核的坚守与重塑。