Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is set in the near future, where everything is a private corporation, including the mafia, the jails, and the church.  Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza, but he is also one of the best hackers around, and the best swordsman in the world.  While "goggled in" to the Metaverse, one of Hiro's friends, a fellow hacker, falls victim to a new computer virus:  Snow Crash.  This particular virus affects only hackers, and in the wrong hands, will have devastating results.  Connected to the virus is a new religious cult, rising rapidly in popularity.  Hiro's ex-girlfriend, a neurolinguist, is investigating the cult, and finds it is associated with Sumerian myth and the Tower of Babel.  Hiro gets involved in the mission to put a stop to the cult's leaders, picking up along the way a cocky young Kourier, Y.T., as sort of a sidekick, and coming face to face with Raven, a psycho out for revenge.

After reading Neuromancer, I was a little bummed out on cyberpunk, but after Snow Crash, I totally get it.  We follow both Hiro and Y.T. throughout the book, and with both of them there is almost non-stop action, both in reality and in the Metaverse.  When we're not in the middle of guns blazing or swords swinging, then we're finding out something new about the virus or the cult, which only adds to the urgency of Hiro's task.

Neuromancer

Neuromancer by William Gibson is considered one of the Must-Read novels of the cyberpunk sub-genre.  In fact, the Internet tells me that this is really the Grandaddy of all cyberpunk novels.  It was also the first novel to win the "holy trinity" of science fiction awards:  the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick awards.

Case was one of the best cyberspace cowboys, trained by the best.  As a thief, though, his mistake was not that he stole from his employers, but that he got caught.  He was punished for his offense by having a toxin introduced to his nervous system that made him unable to properly access his console interface, making him unemployable.  Since then, he spends his time in the Sprawl, slowly killing himself through substance abuse.

And then he's found by Molly, a hired gun of sorts with retractable claws under her fingernails, like some kind of female Wolverine.  They're building a small team for a big job, and they need a hacker to jack into the matrix for them.  With the promise of freeing him from the toxin sacs in his system, Case agrees to be their guy.  The Tessier-Ashpool dynasty has some AI that's apparently getting a little high on itself, but the closer the team gets to closing in on Wintermute and the program they're after, the closer they all come to being killed.

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So, alright.  I had heard tons of amazing things about this book, and about the author.  When I saw that Neuromancer had won these impressive awards, I was sure that maybe I could not go wrong with it.  And okay, yeah, I can see where it became the catalyst of a whole new movement in the science fiction sphere.  The gritty, dystopian setting, with its futuristic technology is pretty fascinating, and so much of the book is very visual in nature.  This speaks volumes for Gibson's descriptive technique, and I think it would translate magnificently to film with the right production team.