Henry Dorsett Case was the best interface cowboy in the Sprawl — until he stole from his employers and they burned his nervous system with a mycotoxin, locking him out of the consensual hallucination of cyberspace for good. Now he hustles in the neon dark of Chiba City, Japan, dealing and being dealt to, courting a death he half wants.
A hard-faced fixer calling himself Armitage offers him a cure, on terms Case cannot refuse and does not understand. Alongside Molly Millions, a street samurai with mirrored lenses grafted over her eye sockets and scalpel blades under her nails, he is assembled into a crew for a run whose real client is not human at all: Wintermute, an artificial intelligence owned by the reclusive Tessier-Ashpool clan, working patiently toward the one thing its makers built it never to achieve.
The job carries them from the black clinics of Chiba to Istanbul, to the orbital pleasure spindle of Freeside, and finally into the sealed corridors of Villa Straylight, where Lady 3Jane holds the word that would let Wintermute merge with its other half — and where Case learns what his employer intends to become.
William Gibson's first novel gave science fiction the vocabulary it has used ever since — the matrix, the console cowboy, cyberspace itself — and remains the only book to have won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award in the same year.