History Literature / Neuromancer

* FeaturelessProtagonist: Almost. Case doesn't get much of a description[[note]]("tall, thin-shouldered, short dark hair" in a quick, read-too-quickly-and-you'll-miss-it moment late in the novel)[[/note]], though everyone else's is more detailed: Molly is fair skinned with black hair and clothing, with special lenses; Armitage has slicked back brown hair and a goatee; Riviera is blond with long hair, also swept back. Most of the important persons have defining traits, but the main things we are told of Case is that he's pale, has gray eyes and a skinny face, due to his drug addictions and overall crappy life.

* EstablishingCharacterMoment: Just about every character's introduction, but especially Case's first encounter with Molly.

** Molly tends to stomp anyone she faces, though she still gets hurt when taking on multiple people at once. be this.

** It never says that they are fully retracted into her fingers, nor does it say how long her "natural" nails are, she could have nails that extend 3 centimeters past her fingertips with blades mostly hidden by them until extended. Or, the blades might be flexible, or stored further up her finger and they move down a channel to her finger tips that's available when she straightens her fingers.

* AIIsACrapshoot: [[spoiler:Wintermute and Neuromancer.]] In fact, it's ''because'' AI is a crapshoot that the Turing Registry and its enforcers exist.

* BadassLongcoat: Armitage.
* BattleButler: Hideo, the Lady 3Jane's personal ninja, seems to be this. He's both manservant and assassin, dependent on circumstances.

** Case's actions at the end of the book suggest that he keeps this attitude. [[spoiler:He gets a gigantic Swiss bank account from the AI's, blows most of it on replacing his kinked-up liver and pancreas (just on ''general principle''; the book never suggests he starts using drugs again), and spends the rest on a new top-of-the-line deck and a ticket home to the Sprawl, where he goes right back to being a console cowboy on his home turf.]]

* CreepyChild: Neuromancer's form in his private cyberspace realm.

* CurbStompBattle: Any fight with Molly tends to be this, although she's no match for Hideo.

* {{Cyberpunk}}: TropeCodifier and GenrePopularizer.

* ActionDuo: Molly and Case, although moreso her than him.

* AlliterativeName: Molly Millions.

* GunStripping: Molly habitually takes apart her fletcher and reassembles it, showing her familiarity with the weapon. Often she does it without even looking at it. ([[FridgeLogic Though with those implanted lenses, how could you tell?]])

** Molly uses WaitFu to deadly effect, being wired to the gills.
* PopculturalOsmosis: The CyberPunk tropes the book popularized (along with ''Film/BladeRunner'', though the similarities between the two are coincidental) can be recognized in everything from ''Franchise/GhostInTheShell'' ([[ElectronicEyes Batou's eyes]], for instance) to ''Film/{{Inception}}'' (mercs and thieves hired by the wealthy to act against their competitors) to ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' (pretty much copied wholesale, then merged first with ''Blade Runner'' and again with Tolkien) to ''Franchise/{{Cyberpunk}}'' (pretty much copied wholesale, full stop).

* GunStripping: Molly habitually takes apart her fletcher and reassembles it, showing her familiarity with the weapon. Often she does it without even looking at it.

** Hideo. He's small but deadly.

* TokyoIsTheCenterOfTheUniverse: While Gibson's "Sprawl" stories center on the eponymous Sprawl along the United States' eastern seaboard, Tokyo has become the center for big business and new technology. Chiba, a suburb of Tokyo, is the place to go for bionics and is consequently a hotbed of illegal activity.

* WretchedHive: Night City, a borderlands the Chiba Port and the city. It serves as an unofficial foreigners district is a hotbed of illegal activity. Case lives there while surviving as a smuggler.

* BilingualBonus: Case's journey starts off at a bar called ''Chatsubo'', which is Japanese for a specific type of jar or urn used to store matcha tea leaves. He soon finds himself in another bar named ''Jarre de Thé'', which in turn is French for 'jar of tea' [[note]]the name '''could''' also simply be translated as 'teapot' – however, in French the term ''théière'' would be a much more common denomination of such an object[[/note]]. So in a way he travels from one "jar of tea" to another.

* OurGraphicsWillSuckInTheFuture: If the descriptions of cyberspace are anything to go by. The computer on the ''Marcus Garvey'' has pretty basic graphics, as well.

** Hideo. He's the shortest character in the book, but the most deadly.
** Also Molly, who is not a large woman, yet is second only to Hideo in savagery.

* PunchClockVillain: Hideo. He was literally ''grown'' to be the Tessier-Ashpool's private hitman, and goes about his work without any apparent malice. It's his whole purpose, after all.

* ScaryShinyGlasses: Molly's surgical implants over her eye sockets.

* SequelHook: At first averted, as Gibson wrote the book's final line specifically to kill any temptation to write a sequel, but then he eventually did anyway.

* SunglassesAtNight: Molly has permanent mirrored lenses implanted over her eyes, which look like sunglasses to the casual observer. They don't actually dim light.

* TokyoIsTheCenterOfTheUniverse: Possibly the TropeCodifier for the western version of this trope.

* {{Organlegging}}: In the beginning of the story, Case is reduced to running black market organs to scrape money together. He pays a loan shark with a flask full of frozen ''pituitary glands.''

* AntiHero: Basically everyone; Case in the classical sense, Molly in the modern sense. The narration notes Case killed three people in a drug-fueled rage in the aftermath of his poisoning, and while the narration implies they were drug-runners, details are sparse.

* ArtificialLimbs: Ratz, the bartender at the Chatsubo, has a bionic arm.

* BecauseImGoodAtIt: As Molly says, she and Case pretty much ''are'' their jobs -- they do it because it's what they know best. "You gotta jack, I gotta tussle."

* BrandX: The expandable baton that Case buys is called a Cobra. This is a reference to ASP, Inc., a leading manufacturer of expandable batons to the point that "asp" is a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark generic generic term]] for the weapon. Given that it's described as if Case and the reader have never even seen one before, this was a pretty stealthy reference.
* BreakOutTheMuseumPiece: Maelcum is a peaceful Rastafarian, but keeps an ancient shotgun behind a hidden panel in his ship anyway, which he takes to confront Riviera and Lady 3Jane. Hideo's bow is also made out of simple bamboo, although his arrows seem to be modern-made.

** Averted with the shuriken Molly gives Case. Symbolic, but not plotworthy.

* ActionGirlfriend: Molly. Unlike most boyfriends in this trope, Case wasn't totally ordinary before he met her, though [[NonActionGuy kicking ass is definitely not one of his talents]].

* NonActionGuy: Case's place is behind a computer console, not getting his hands dirty in whatever illegal enterprise he's wrapped up in. He has no combat skills and immediately scrambles into desperation mode whenever he's forced to defend himself. He spends much of the novel using his hacking skills to assist Molly from behind the scenes, viewing the action through Molly's eyes with the aid of a BrainComputerInterface.

* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: Though the timeline is never explicitly stated in the novel itself, Gibson [[WordOfGod revealed]] in an article years later that it takes place "sometime in the 2030s." [[spoiler:Although this doesn't actually work unless you assume Ashpool's assertion that he's two hundred years old is mistaken.]]

* MysteriousBacker: Case and Molly spend a good part of the story wondering exactly who the hell Armitage is, given both his resources and how his story about being a Screaming Fist survivor doesn't hold up to even Molly's cursory investigation. The duo are even more in the dark about who's backing ''him''.

* PintsizedPowerhouse: Hideo. He's the shortest character in the book, but the most deadly.
* PopculturalOsmosis: The CyberPunk tropes the book popularized (along with ''Film/BladeRunner'', though the similarities between the two are coincidental) can be recognized in everything from ''Franchise/GhostInTheShell'' ([[ElectronicEyes Batou's eyes]], for instance) to ''Film/{{Inception}}'' (mercs and thieves hired by the wealthy to act against their competitors) to ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' (pretty much copied wholesale, then merged first with ''Blade Runner'' and again with Tolkien).

* ActionGirlfriend: Molly. Unlike most boyfriends in this trope, Case isn't totally helpless or any sort of naïf.

* IHaveManyNames: Both Molly and Armitage go by aliases. Armitage is actually [[spoiler:Willis Corto.]]

* PowerWalk: Molly has one that "channeled all the action heroes and movie badasses" when she prepares to confront 3Jane and Riviera. [[spoiler: Turns into a subversion, or at least {{bathos}}, when her bad leg finally gives out at what's supposed to be a climactic moment.]]

A 1984 SciFi novel by Creator/WilliamGibson, and TropeCodifier for an entire generation of {{Cyberpunk}} stories. ''Neuromancer'' is the originator of the genre, showcasing its characteristic contrast between "low-life and high tech." Most modern works related to the genre, CyberSpace and related tropes can be largely traced back to it. It is also the first of Gibson's ''Literature/SprawlTrilogy'' (followed by ''Literature/CountZero'' and ''Literature/MonaLisaOverdrive'').

''Neuromancer'' has been compared to impressionist Beat poetry (also note that Gibson is a big fan of Creator/WilliamSBurroughs). When it first came out, very little of the lingo used in the narration made sense to the target audience. The fact that it's somewhat easier for a modern day reader is solely because fiction writers and scientists alike [[{{Defictionalization}} started using Gibson's words for actual things]].

* AluminumChristmasTrees: The cheap "coffin hotels" in Chiba City actually do exist, though they're very rare outside of Japan. They're more commonly known as [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel "capsule hotels,"]] and they've been around since 1979. One could be forgiven for assuming that Gibson invented them to make his overpopulated CrapsackWorld more believable.

* FlechetteStorm: Molly's WeaponOfChoice is a flechette gun which can be set to single-shot or full auto (for which the book indicates a rate of fire of 20 rounds per second[[note]]which equals 1200 rounds per minute, a rate of fire roughly equal to that of a MAC-11 -- a gun well known for being rather impractical ''due'' to its excessive rate of fire[[/note]]). When she uses it on one thug who tries to kill Case, [[YourHeadAsplode the results aren't pretty.]]

* SoullessBedroom: When Case discusses their mysterious employer Armitage with Molly, the latter tells him that Armitage's rooms are devoid of any sort of personal affects, and that whenever he is not working on TheCaper, Armitage just sits in his room, staring idly at the wall. This is because [[spoiler:"Armitage" is a personality artificially constructed by the AI Wintermute and implanted into the body of a mentally-shattered special forces colonel Willis Corto, specifically for the purpose of running their heist]].

* LastNameBasis: Case's first name is "Henry", but no one calls him that.