Case used to be a hotshot "cowboy" hacker who got caught and he was punished by being changed to being physically unable to connect to cyberspace. He ends up in a city in Japan, where drugs and criminals rule the nights.
He is approached by two people, Armitage and Molly who say they can reverse the punishment and in exchange they need him to hack into the Tessier-Ashpool computer system, which is located off of Earth on Freeside, a space station that is a luxury resort for the wealthy and the home and headquarters of the Tessier-Ashpool family.
Armitage wants Case to use a virus to penetrate the Tessier-Ashpool computer system. Armitage is taking his orders from Wintermute, an artificial intelligence who is determined to break into Tessier-Ashpool's system. And Case doesn't care about anything but getting back into cyberspace and once again becoming a hacker cowboy.
This novel won lots of prizes but I found it very confusing. I didn't even totally understand what it was about until I read the Wikipedia page about it. Just too many characters, too much going on, too many trippy drug scenes, too much slang and jargon. Like flipping and ice. I still don't understand what those terms are referring to. This story just didn't compute for me.
Here is a review by John Mullan in The Guardian.
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