William Gibson’s Neuromancer is important to modern cyberpunk not simply because it appeared early, but because it gave the genre one of its most influential frameworks. Published in 1984, the novel helped turn cyberpunk from an emerging trend into a recognizable movement within science fiction. It portrayed a world shaped by global corporations, urban decay, invasive technology, and skilled outsiders operating beyond respectable institutions. It also popularized “cyberspace” as a literary space that human consciousness could enter, providing later writers, filmmakers, and game designers with a language for virtual experience. Its influence remains strong because Neuromancer did not present technology as purely liberating or purely destructive. Instead, it imagined high-tech life as seductive, unstable, unequal, and closely tied to power. This balance became central to later cyberpunk: the blend of glamour and decay, speed and alienation, technical brilliance and moral ambiguity. Although modern cyberpunk works differ in setting and politics, many still reflect Gibson’s idea that digital systems do not exist outside society but intensify the structures already within it. For this reason, Neuromancer remains important not as a relic, but as a template that expanded cyberpunk’s possibilities.