The single most remarkable thing about this book is its date of publication: 1984. Think back to the world then. In Britain, we had only recently seen a fourth television channel – Channel 4, natch – computers still kept their memory on floppy discs and the most electronic thing in the average household would have been the radio, tuned to FM stations.

In this, almost pre-modern world, William Gibson’s Neuromancer appeared like an avatar of an incredible future. But as the years have rolled past, the connected, datarich world that Gibson posited has come closer and closer: if the measure of a science fiction novel is how clearly it looks into the future, then Neuromancer is an extraordinary success.

But prognostication alone does not a great book make: for that you need language. And it is here that Gibson’s book exceeds its prophetic function, for in Neuromancer Gibson invented the language of a future that did not yet exist and, by doing so, made it credible and possible. For without a language, without names, the pregnant future cannot come to birth. By inventing the language of the future, Gibson made it credible – then all it required was the scientists to engineer it. And they did, and here we are, in the future that Gibson named.

So Neuromancer may be the most important novel of the last fifty years. Next to that, the actual story hardly matters, which is probably just as well, as the plot is standard noir, where everyone and everything double-crosses each other, but without the moral core that Philip Marlowe provides in the Raymond Chandler novels that are, stylistically, the progenitors of Gibson’s work. Case, the hero, is as much a cipher as the virtual reality which is the only place where he actually comes alive, and the other characters are so alienated as to be, for all intents and purposes, actual aliens in human skins. The AIs don’t rise to the status of characters either. But this all beside the point: Gibson imagined our future and, for byter or worse, we seem set on bringing it about.