Please recommend more Gibson for me to read, because I've only read Neuromancer and it just didn't do it for me. It felt like all the pulpy bullshit of a Philip K Dick novel without the substantive ideas, the melodrama, or the drug-induced psychosis. It felt cold and clinical.
yeah, Gibson pretty much admits that his cyberpunk was inspired by his love of certain prose styles and how other writers could imply an entire world with a few well chosen neolgisms (and his distaste for Golden Age scifi tropes), and that he knew almost nothing about the tech and at the time of Neuromancer had never even been to Asia. In that respect Stephenson is the opposite: even in Snow Crash which is basically caricaturing cyberpunk, he feels the need to explain how everything works. Which doesn't necessarily move the plot along on, but there's more depth to the worldbuilding even when the ideas grate.
Don't think you'd pick either of them for their characters
I have a theory that cyberpunk works better in visual media. Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Angel Alita, The Matrix, Deus Ex, etc. It feels like a genre where often the ideas are there in service of Cool. Not that they are devoid of big ideas, but just that aesthetics matter more.
Related to that, Gibson has gotten one notorious adaptation of a short story to screen: Johnny Mnemonic. It's based on a short set vaguely "near" Neuromancer in setting/timeline. That movie is still a fun goofy pleasure and is truly aesthetics in service of Cool. I think it captures some of the aesthetics people love in the trilogy that starts with Neuromancer if you prefer the visual to the prose.
I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.
Part of your complaint is probably related to his style. Neuromancer was his first novel, and his style, while remaining distinctive, has improved substantially over the years. You may like it better in the The Bigend Trilogy: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History: all vintage, recognizable Gibson, but not actually science fiction, and very much in tune with the world post-9/11. As much as I love all of Gibson, those three are my favorites, especially the first.
Dividing his books into "trilogies" is a little misleading; they all happen in the same shared universe and some common characters, but don't have deeply connected stories. Give Pattern Recognition a try, and see if 20 years makes a difference to you. (If you like audiobooks, Pattern Recognition is a gem, with almost the perfect fusion between story and narrator.)
In some of his books, he is supposed to engage with vèvès from voodoo as similar to electronic circuit diagrams, according to a long ago Guardian comment [1], and I’ve never been able to track it down in “the sequels to Pattern Recognition” (as opposed to Count Zero) to my satisfaction.
