I put off reading this one for years because I was scared it would be homework. the kind of sci-fi you’re supposed to have read, the way you’re supposed to have seen Citizen Kane, and then you watch it and mostly just clock where everything else stole from it. that’s not what happened. what happened is I read the first line, the one about the sky and the dead channel, and got a little annoyed at how good it was, and then spent the next two hundred pages only about sixty percent sure what was happening to Case at any given moment.

I don’t think that’s a flaw exactly. Gibson explains nothing. he throws you into the jargon, ice and flatlining and the Sprawl, and trusts you to either keep up or enjoy the drowning. I kept up maybe a third of the time, which is a real number, not modesty. the book is going straight on my reread shelf, because I know for a fact I missed things, the way you miss things on a first pass through a museum where you’re mostly just trying not to bump into anyone.

what got me, more than the plot, was how it feels like it was written by someone who could already see 2013 coming and just wrote it down thirty years early. there’s a review I keep thinking about, someone saying they wondered how mind-blowing this must’ve been in 1984, before the Matrix movies and Ghost in the Shell had already done the work of making cyberspace feel normal to us. reading it now is like reading a prophecy after half of it already came true, which drains some of the shock but adds a different, weirder kind of vertigo.

the one thing that didn’t land for me: Molly. she’s fantastic in the moment, all mirrored eyes and retractable blades, and then she’s just gone from the story in a way that felt less like a choice and more like Gibson lost interest. and I noticed, once, that the word “lozenge” shows up so often I started translating it in my head as “cough drop” every time, which is the kind of thing that only bothers you on page 140 of a book you otherwise respect.

four stars, not five, because I want to be honest that I didn’t fully get it and a five feels like lying about that. but it’s the kind of book where not fully getting it is sort of the point.