Sprawl Trilogy 1.

The sky above the harbor turned gray like a television screen during a break.

With this sentence, one of the best science fiction novels of all time begins, and nothing has predicted the future more accurately. William Gibson's work, published in 1984 and awarded with the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards, is the cornerstone of the cyberpunk genre, and its influence can still be seen in films, music, video games and other contemporary works of art. Moreover, here we can meet the matrix for the first time, the global consensual hallucination that embodies every single data byte of cyberspace, and which served as the basis for the world of the cult film of the same name fifteen years later.

Case was the best data thief in the matrix, until he made the classic mistake of stealing from his agents, who poisoned his nervous system as punishment, banishing him from cyberspace forever. But now a mysterious figure calling himself Armitage promises him redemption: a full recovery if Case accepts a job against an immeasurably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting the Earth in the service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool clan. With the saved memory of a legendary data thief and the protection of a street samurai, Case sets off in both the real world and the matrix, and the rest is, as they say: science fiction history.

The reader is holding the book in a new translation, which, in addition to Gibson's exclusive afterword, also includes Jack Womack's essay Some Dark Pit.