In addition to their "romancing" of information technology, cyberpunk plots are an amalgam of familiar motifs from gangster films, espionage thrillers (Julie Deane as the Sidney Greenstreet character in The Maltese Falcon or the burnt-out spy in John Le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy), chase-and-adventure fiction and film (notably Case's personal entrapment in a DOA situation), and contemporary SF fiction and film (especially the work of Philip K. Dick, for example, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the Ridley Scott cinematic version, Bladerunner).

It is worth exploring the ways that some borrowed elements become mutually self-cancelling. For example, Molly is a "tough girl" fantasy figure, but for half the novel she becomes the object of a "damsel rescue" plot. The suggestion of fairy-tale motifs is not necessarily far-fetched. In her essay, "Trouble (Living in the Machine)," Gwyneth Jones notes "When you jack-in, you pass through the Door in the Wall of a thousand fairytales and enter a land imbued with meaning...Literary cyberspace, then becomes the latest in an age-old succession of magical supernatural realms identified with the world of thought..." (94-95). Jones's observations are useful in considering the denouement of Neuromancer.

One motif that has received relatively little discussion, with the exception of an article by Keith Booker, "Technology, History, and the Postmodern Imagination: the Cyberpunk Fiction of William Gibson," is the "Waste Land" motif so obviously evoked toward the end of the novel (81). Central to T. S. Eliot's poem is the "waste land" of the Grail legend, and if neither Case nor Molly is the "shop-worn Galahad" of "hard-boiled" detective fiction, the all-important artifact is a well-guarded "grail" for the adventurers as well as for the AIs.