Case is a burned-out console cowboy in Chiba City, hired for one last job by people who have already put a slow poison in him to guarantee he finishes it.
It invented most of the vocabulary. Cyberspace, the matrix, the idea that the interesting future is corporate rather than governmental. Written in 1984 on a manual typewriter by someone who had barely used a computer, which explains why the technology is evocative rather than accurate, and why that turned out not to matter.
The prose is the thing. It drops you into the slang with no explanation and expects you to keep up.
Read April 1987. I came back to the territory much later with Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon.
