I am also amused, not only by the sneakiness of the publisher (hope they don't get sued), but by the fact that the folks on williamgibsonboard.com are so outraged that this has happened. The travesty! The injustice! The wretched commercialism of it all!

Thanks, David. My mood is now slightly lifted.

well, that was exactly the same thing I wanted to do: scanning the cover of the book and sending it to a site where I can read the reactions of ppl who know Gibson. I'm a Turk living in Istanbul, Turkey and when I saw the cover, I was totally shocked. how on earth could they steal Matrix and Gibson and mix them like that? this was a REAL shame. how can one compare a masterpiece like Neuromancer to a trendy, commercial movie like Matrix? not that I dislike Matrix or something, just the opposite, I'm a Matrix fan but selling Neuromancer using a cheap cheap selling trick like this is unacceptable.
I can barely control my feelings about going to that publisher and shouting out loud (hehe even breaking their necks) and telling them to pull themselves together.

btw how did you find this out?

I’m not the one who found it; I just saw it on William Gibson’s weblog. It is tacky, but you’ll note that Mr. Gibson himself doesn’t seem to mind. And like I said, if it gets a few Turkish Matrix fans to read the book, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, they should know where the Wachowski brothers stole their ideas from. :)

aha, thanks for the link. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person in this country who likes and respects Gibson and gets angry at this trick. well, after all, you may be right anyway. let's see if this is gonna boost the sells -since Mr. Gibson doesn't mind- and thus show ppl whay good sci-fi is :} .

it's sort of fucked up that some people here are attacking this marketing move on the basis of anti-populist elitism. First of all, the word matrix to the sci-fi realm as we know it was introduced by Gibson anyway. And I must remind you that, Gibson himself has been a leading populist artist/writer since long before matrix the movie was released. So shut the fuck up and stop thinking that just because you have run into tarkovsky or godard by coincidence you can consider yourself a film expert, a member of the higher echelons of the "culture" hierarchy. Leave alone Matrix, even films like Legally Blonde are out of your reach of criticism if you don't drop your petty and convoluted perspective yarrak kafa!

Well, you don’t have to watch Godard to see in the second and third Matrix films considerable evidence that the quality of the first one was accidental. But yeah, just as there’s nothing more heartwarming than seeing a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice, there’s nothing more funny than watching fans of one form of popular commercial art attack another one for being too popular and commercial.

Again, “considerable and enjoyably convoluted amusement” is clearly the correct response here.

P.S. You’re going to have to translate “yarrak kafa” for us linguistically challenged Anglophones. Or were you just being Dada?