It gives me great pleasure to have these three books digitized, data-compressed, and published in this (make no mistake) revolutionary format. We participate, you and I, in the death of print-as-we-knew-it, and should experience thereby an exquisite frisson of ecstasy and dread. So soon, we plunge toward a world in which the word "library" simply means something on the other end of a modem.

But I confess it gives me greater pleasure still, to contemplate that process whereby every tech, however sharp this morning, is invariably supplanted by the new, the unthinkable, and to imagine these words, unread and finally inaccessible, gathering dust at the back of some drawer in some year far up the road. Nothing in there but a tarnished Yale key, a silver dime, a couple of desiccated moths, and several hundred thousand data-compressed words, all in a row.

I know; I put them there.

I'd like to take this opportunity to cite and thank the late Terry Carr, who commissioned the work that became Neuromancer from an unknown and thoroughly unconfident writer, one whose track-record at the time consisted of a handful of short stories. If Terry hadn't been willing to take a chance with me, when he did, thereby forcing me to write something (a novel) I felt several working years short of being ready to do, it's most unlikely that these books would exist today.

-Vancouver, 6/16/92

1 - The Smoke

The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita.

For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her purse, a smooth dark oblong, one side impressed with the ubiquitous Maas-Neotek logo, the other gently curved to fit the user's palm.