SOURCE: Brouillette, Sarah. “Corporate Publishing and Canonization: Neuromancer and Science-Fiction Publishing in the 1970s and early 1980s.” In Book History, edited by Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose, pp. 187-208. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Brouillette presents an analysis of the 1984 publication of Neuromancer in terms of the relationship between the corporate publishing industry and the science fiction subculture.

Since its initial publication as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1984, William Gibson's Neuromancer has been established as one of the most influential and respected novels in the history of its genre, as well as in mainstream literary culture. It won the three major awards in the science-fiction field that year—the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick awards—and has since gone on to receive critical treatment rarely accorded to novels that were initially marketed as genre science fiction. Indeed, it...