I think a lot of the hype is because it’s the first of its genre. It does for cyberpunk what LOTR did for Fantasy I guess and in that regard I can understand the hype.

Also he’s very good at using simile and metaphors to give a feel to the world and to kind of separate the genre from science fiction. He does some nice things by describing organic stuff using artificial qualities. Like of course you have the iconic “The sky above the port was the color of TV tuned to a dead channel”. But then there’s this other part where Case takes this potent drug and the description is something like his bones became chrome under silicone or something along those lines that I thought was awesome. But the plot itself gets lost in all these very vivid descriptions and how he literally moves from one scene to the next without anything indications.