I do not have a soft spot (or any) for science fiction, but one quality I admire is prophetic narrations and seemingly 'apocalyptic' type books such as Neuromancer. Starting in Japan, one of the technologically advanced countries of today, the "sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." William Gibson does not mention any color, but from today we know that the static in television sets is gray, or some shade of darkness. Throughout the Chapter One William Gibson refers to dark figures in dark places, with dark dialogue. The "black clinics" of Chiba and the corners that Case had "cut in Night City," the "East European steel and brown decay" of Ratz and the unknown areas of "the Sprawl" all add to the ambiguity of the novel. A tone of desperation is noted in Case. If you have ever seen movies such as The Matrix, Fight Club, or other dark movies (maybe even the new Batman with Joker), these are the images that Gibson integrates to his writing -- life seems very hopeless and alone in dystopic settings, as if people have accepted the fact of an end of the world through corruption, greed aided by technology.
Night City was like a "deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." Survival of the fittest implies a very rugged future society, and very 'hard' and harsh dialogues as Gibson capitalizes on. He spends an equal amount of time with dialogue and description, but all the dialogues are curt and all the descriptions are very polluted and shady, like a pall overcast each individual character and dialogue. Gibson goes on to use very creature-like words such as Night city being there not for its "inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself." Inhabitants and playground both suggest primitive and animalistic portrayals of humans. "Darwinism" and evolution may link these ideas together as well.

As said before, I like novels that are eerily prophetic in the way they are told. Neuromancer was written in 1984 -- far before iPods, the internet, even an idea of cyberspace, or this laptop was capable of being dreamt. The brilliance of this novel is the entire other world that Gibson was able to create before his time (much like Gary Snyder being the proto-hippie of his time). I guess Gibson is the proto-cyberpunk of his time. I don't know how accurate his predictions were, but just the idea that this man thought of an entire other virtual world also adds to the depth of darkness in Neuromancer. He uses exceptional texture and vision to --possibly--accurately foreshadow human civilization, and how so much advancement may push them to lose control of their own destination. There is some dark lurking truth to Neuromancer that I refuse to believe, but can't help and think is true:

"Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture."