My experience with cyberpunk has not been large. I have read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and liked them well enough. This Canadian novel is the archetypal cyberpunk novel and won the triple crown of sci-fi literary awards: the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. For most of the novel, I was not too enticed. I kept waiting for myself to care, and to feel really invested into the plot. It did not happen, at least not the extent that I wanted it to. As a a result, I have feeling I’ll forget the plot of this book fairly soon. I think the blunt and straightforward prose are an advantage, but I was not wholly interested in the story. There are interesting concepts about AI, genetic engineering, cyberspace, and the concepts of the power of the free market to over rule the current world structure. Gibson wrote about all these before it was popular in the mainstream. If only I did not feel I have already read it all before because this fifteen years on. This would probably be a good introduction to cyberpunk as it has all the elements.