cyberpunk-novels

""What did you do to that guy?" "I completed the movement he began when he struck you…His unusual center of gravity made it possible to sever the spinal cord without contacting the vertebrae themselves." This in a tone that someone might use to describe the discovery of a new but convenient bus route."

"Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here."

"Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work rent-a-cop…These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911—" "What happened in 1911?" the Rooster demands. Laney sighs. "I'm still not sure…Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there."

"“[Harwood] is the richest man in the world and ahead of the curve. He’s an agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He embodies paradoxical propositions. Too hip to live, too rich to die. Get it?” “No.” “We think he’s like us, basically,” Klaus says. “He’s trying to hack reality, but he’s going strictly big casino, and he’ll take the rest of the species with him.”"

"Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature’s way of telling you you had too much money to begin with."

"Everything to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he’d built Skinner’s funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, Fontaine had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner’s room."

"Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise, you'd steal. Boomzilla understands that."

"What he needed, Rydell thought, was something he could do that they weren't expecting. Something that put the shoe on the other foot, or anyway he should lose them, whoever they were. He'd had an instructor in Knoxville who'd liked to talk about lateral thinking…What it took, sometimes, was just your basic jack move, something nobody, maybe even you, was expecting."

"Lucky Dragon Nanofax has a hatch on the front Boomzilla could fit through, he wanted to, and he wonders would that make more Boomzillas other places and could he trust those motherfuckers? If he could, he'd have a tight posse but he doesn't trust anybody, why should they?"

"Fontaine knows the bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridge's host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing."

"It's what we do now instead of bohemias," Harwood says. "Instead of what?" "Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies…And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct." "Extinct?" "We started picking them before they could ripen…as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."

"The knife's plain haft, against his ribs, through a starched evening shirt. The handles of a craftman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand. That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace."

"San Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities."

"Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history than love."

"They were there, seated in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there before. One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era…The other presented an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter… "Mr. Rydell," said the one with the hat, "thank you for coming. You may call me Klaus. This is the Rooster." "Listen to me, Rydell," the Rooster said. "You are now responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible value. Where is it?" "I don't know who you are. I'm not telling you anything." Klaus coughed dryly. "The only proper answer." "In your situation," said the Rooster, "you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares to address you." "We are here to assure you, Mr. Rydell, that the resources of the Walled City will be at your disposal in the coming crisis.""

"Someday he'll have his shit together right. He'll live in a house, and it will be clean as Lucky Dragon. All lit up like that, and he'll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches. Watch everybody's ass and nobody fuck with him."

"Harwood smiles. "A number of major cities have these autonomous zones, and how a given city chooses to deal with the situation can impact drastically on that city's image. Copenhagen, for instance, was one of the first, and has done very well. Atlanta, I suppose, would be the classic example of what not to do." Harwood blinks."

"There were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood…everybody had something they “really” did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she’d had massages from a girl who was really a stunt double for some actress Chevette had never heard of… Somebody had everybody’s number, but it looked like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that."

""And I'm safer with you than I am with these guys you say are mercs?" "I think so, yes," the man said, frowning, as though he took the question very seriously. "You kill anybody else in the past forty-eight hours? "No, I did not." "Well," Rydell said, "I guess I'm with you. I'm sure not going to try to fight you." "That is wise," the man said."

"But the one who shines is there, and beside her another, less clear. "This is Mister Laney," she says, in the language of Silencio's mother. "You must help him. He needs to find a watch." It is a LeCoultre Futurematic, a back-winder, with wind reserve. Silencio knows its serial number, its bid history, its number in today's auction. "Someone is taking it away, and you must follow it." Silencio looks from the beautiful face of the Futurematic to the face of the woman. "You must find it for him.""

"Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined."

"The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport become a destination…He has glimpsed the edges of a life there that he feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion."

"Rydell watched this man move ahead, in front of him, and felt something complicated. He'd always dreamed of a special kind of grace…what he was seeing now, what he was following: this guy who was maybe fifty, and who moved in a way that kept him in every bit of available shadow…and Rydell followed, in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all these years to be something like this man, whoever and whatever he was."

"Harwood considers him from the distance behind his glasses. “Do you believe in the forces of history?” “I believe in what brings us to the moment,” Konrad says. “I seem to have come to believe in the moment myself. I believe we are approaching one, drawn to it by the gravity of its strangeness. It is a moment in which everything and nothing will change…If the world is to be reborn, I wish to be reborn in it, as something akin to what I am today.”"

"The Finn was looking at Bobby now. “I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.""

"Shit. He'd come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the icebreaker he'd rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in, punching for the base he'd chosen as his first live target…He'd only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but he already knew he wanted to be more than just some Barrytown hotdogger. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, but it was already over."

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

"The stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t."

"The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she’d heard of but had no intention of buying."

"“As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.”"

"“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”"

"Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway."

"They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming."

"He was good as new. How good was that? He didn’t know. He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of Singapore. Home was the next airport Hyatt."

"Neuromancer, though it’s careful never to admit it, is set in the 2030s, when there’s something like the Internet, but called “cyberspace,” and a complete absence of cell phones, which I’m sure young readers assume must be a key plot-point. More accurately, there’s something like cyberspace, but called “cyberspace,” but that gets confusing. I followed Neuromancer with two more novels set in that particular future, but by then I was growing frustrated with the capital-F Future. I knew that those books were actually about the 1980s, when they were written, but almost nobody else seemed to see that."

"It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths."

"COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT—On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero."

"In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic container without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of corridor, he changed his ticket."

"The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita. For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her purse…The ghost woke to Kumiko's touch as they began their descent into Heathrow…a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches and riding boots. "Hullo," the ghost said…"Name's Colin…Didn't get your name." "You aren't real," she said sternly. He shrugged."

"He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then — old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy — his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die."

""You are worse than a fool," Michle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. "You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?" There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. "You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now." She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer."

""How old are you, boss?" "Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and you are in the way." "One thing," Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. "Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?" He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged. "It doesn't matter," Roland said. "You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we _create_ flexibility, in situations where it is required." The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's."

"Case stared. "I don't understand you guys at all." "Don' stan you, mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one." Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix."

"Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer."

""What's your name? Your Turing code. What is it?" "Neuromancer, the lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed."

""Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me." "Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked."

"I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money."

"I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature."

"So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's Escape from New York, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and all other artifacts of the style sometimes dubbed "cyberpunk." Those French guys, they got their end in early."

"I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans."