I am going to nominate
Neuromancer {1984} by William Gibson. Here's the amazon.com review:
"Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.
Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price...."
This is an amazing, challenging, cyberpunk novel that explores all sorts of significant concepts in a framework that has influenced not only novels but anime masterpieces such as the
Ghost in the Shell sequence of Oshii and films like
Matrix and
Dark City.
It's not an easy read, but it rewards the challenges Gibson sets the reader. It is available for Kindle and is priced under $7.
varios epub versions are available at around the same price from a number of sites including:
http://www.ebooks.com/256284/neuroma...ibson-william/
and
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/B...007462,00.html