Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price....
"Mr. Gibson's characters inhabit a bleak amoral world entirely dictated by the machinations of global corporations and organized crime. In it, the closest anyone comes to integrity is dropping out and scrounging on the margins. The outsiders Mr. Gibson chooses for his heroes--hackers, street kids, bike messengers--seldom want more than to save their own skins and be left alone afterward. It was an ethos perfectly suited to the indolent cynicism of post-60's youth culture and the have-code-will-travel individualism of the programming class."