Comment by Barrin92

>as exhausting to read as Neuromancer

the exhaustion is the point. Gibson is great because he turned the essence of the genre, media oversaturation, into a prose style. Cyberpunk is all about everything being in your face. Things are flashing by, too fast, too dense, you're disoriented, etc.

You aren't supposed to understand or put every term under a microscope, you should feel as disoriented as the characters. One of the strongest aspects of the book is how successful he is at making you feel as if you're hooked into something running on 120% speed.

Not unlike Gene Wolfe in the Book of the New Sun, where Wolfe recombines words and invents language as the conceit is that the narrator is translating from a future work into contemporary English, having to make use of words that don't yet exist. You're not supposed to grab the dictionary and try to figure out what each term means, you're supposed to take it in as you go on.