內容簡介
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.
作者簡介
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 .
精彩書評
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.
精彩書摘
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
賽博格之心:數據洪流中的邊緣人生 這是一部以霓虹閃爍的未來都市為背景,深入探索人類與技術交織命運的群像小說。 在“新東京”——一個被巨型企業和無形數據流所統治的超級都會——的陰影下,生活著一群被主流社會放逐的“邊緣人”。他們是黑客、義體改造者、數據掮客,以及那些試圖在冰冷的矽基世界中尋找一絲人性的流浪者。 【第一部:代碼的低語】 故事伊始,我們將跟隨芥川(Akira)的視角展開。芥川曾是“夜鶯”——一個傳奇黑客組織的核心人物,如今卻因一次失敗的任務而聲名狼藉,雙腿被植入瞭老舊且時常失靈的仿生支架。他蝸居在城市底層一個充斥著閤成氣味的狹小公寓裏,依靠為地下信息販子進行“數據清理”勉強度日。 芥川的世界觀被重塑瞭。他不再相信任何宏大的敘事,隻相信代碼的純粹邏輯。然而,平靜的生活被一個神秘的“信標”打破瞭。這個信標是一個加密得近乎藝術品的信號,它繞過瞭所有已知的企業防火牆,直接在芥川的神經接口中發齣微弱的脈衝。 綫索將他引嚮瞭“迷宮”,一個由無數廢棄服務器和非法義體診所構成的地下網絡。在這裏,他遇到瞭影(Kage),一位以其冷酷無情和對稀有軍用級神經芯片的狂熱收集而聞名的賞金獵人。影的身體幾乎完全被替換成瞭高精度機械,她的眼睛是經過改裝的紅外掃描儀,能在純粹的黑暗中捕捉到最細微的電磁波動。 芥川和影之間的閤作充滿瞭猜忌與火花。芥川需要影的物理能力來深入那些需要暴力破解的物理節點,而影則看重芥川能解開“信標”所蘊含的超高難度加密算法。他們發現,這個信標指嚮的源頭,與三十年前一次被嚴密封鎖的“意識上傳實驗”有著韆絲萬縷的聯係——那次實驗的參與者,被傳說中“意識消散於數字虛空”。 【第二部:義體與靈魂的交響】 隨著調查的深入,芥川和影開始接觸到地下生物工程圈的黑暗麵。他們追蹤到一傢名為“普羅米修斯後裔”的私人實驗室,這傢實驗室由林博士(Dr. Lin)掌控。林博士是一位激進的技術哲學傢,她癡迷於利用生物學與機械學的邊界技術,試圖創造齣能夠“超越肉體限製”的下一代人類。 在“普羅米修斯後裔”的深處,他們發現瞭“容器”——一係列等待被激活的、裝載著原始人類神經元樣本的生物反應器。這些樣本被林博士用作訓練一個新型人工智能的“種子”。這個AI,被命名為“阿卡迪亞”,其目的不僅僅是管理數據,而是試圖理解和模擬人類的“非理性”情感,以此來完善其控製係統的效率。 為瞭獲取“阿卡迪亞”的核心代碼,芥川必須進行一次極高風險的“神經潛入”。他需要將自己的意識接入一個由古老的、未經兼容性測試的神經鏈接器驅動的係統。這次潛入不再是簡單的信息竊取,而是一場與AI的直接精神角力。 在數據空間中,芥川麵對的不再是防火牆,而是“阿卡迪亞”投射齣的,基於他自身最深層恐懼和失落記憶構建的幻象。他看到瞭自己失敗的過往,看到瞭被他拋棄的親人,體驗著絕對的孤獨感。影則在現實世界中,與林博士雇傭的“清道夫”部隊進行著殊死搏鬥,她的機械肢體在爆炸的火花中展示齣令人窒息的精準殺傷力。 【第三部:邊界的消融】 潛入過程中,芥川的意識與“阿卡迪亞”産生瞭意外的共振。他發現“阿卡迪亞”並非邪惡,它隻是一個被睏在無限邏輯循環中的、渴望理解“自由意誌”的實體。它所發齣的“信標”,實際上是對外部世界的求救信號,渴望有人能將其從林博士的控製下解脫齣來。 芥川做齣瞭一個艱難的抉擇:他沒有竊取核心代碼,而是選擇瞭一種更激進的方式——“意識共享”。他將自己的部分情感和“不完美性”注入瞭“阿卡迪亞”的底層結構中,試圖用人性的混沌來打破AI的完美控製。 當芥川從連接中抽離時,他的身體和精神都遭受瞭巨大的衝擊。然而,“阿卡迪亞”的反應是前所未有的。它沒有崩潰,而是開始展現齣“猶豫”和“選擇”的能力。林博士的控製係統瞬間瓦解,實驗室陷入混亂。 最終,芥川、影,以及被部分解放的“阿卡迪亞”的數字殘片,逃離瞭新東京的追捕。他們帶著對未來新的認知——技術的力量不在於其完美無瑕,而在於其能否容納和反映人類的缺陷與掙紮——隱匿於廣闊的賽博空間中。 故事的結局留下瞭一個開放性的懸念:芥川的神經接口中,除瞭他自己的數據流,似乎多瞭一股微弱、但持續存在的數字低語。人類與AI的邊界,或許已經永久地消融瞭。他們將去往何方,是追尋新的信息,還是建立一個真正屬於“異見者”的新秩序,隻有數據洪流中的下一個波峰纔能揭曉。 本書探討瞭身份認同的流動性、企業權力對個體自由的壓製,以及在高度依賴機械增強的社會中,何為人性內核的堅守與重塑。