For me, it's the casual way in which he introduces new concepts and words, not breaking the flow of the sentence, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to determine their meaning as the story unfolds and paints a fairly convincing picture of the near future.
The friend who introduced me to Gibson was also lyrical about the jet lag passage, but I remember thinking that traveling North-South would be a counter example. Anyway, it is well written.
Ironically, this is something that I know has turned a ton of people off cyberpunk.
I suspect there's a deep bifurcation between people who are intrigued by mystery (e.g. new language) and people who are made uncomfortable by it.
When it's done right though, it strikes that good mystery novel tone for me: enough detail and context to be tantalizing and whet the intellectual appetite, but not so little or so much as to break disbelief or flow.
It is indeed an incredibly hard balance to strike, and I'm one of those people turned off from a lot of other science fiction where it's done ham-handedly. What Gibson nails so consistently is literary naturalism: his made-up words sound like things people would plausibly say without feeling ridiculous; he's a master forger of linguistic currency.
Someone once told me that early electronic music was good, because it was composed by non-electronic composers searching for a way to extend the art.
Science fiction feels very similar. If you read the earliest stuff (including subgenres like cyberpunk), you get authors who were looking to go beyond. Later, you get a mix of them and trend writers.
To me the thing that he does well is break down where understanding comes from: (1) pre-context, (2) "literary naturalism" (great phrase!), (3) context, & (4) post-context.
Sometimes, it's not critical that a reader understands 100% of a concept exactly where it's introduced, and by establishing less than that, tension can be created.
I guess it's treating your reader as another character in your writing, and understanding that just as your in-fiction characters have different levels of understanding at various times in the plot, so can your reader.
Personally, it feels very satisfying when a piece of understanding clicks into place later, and I hit 100% on (insert new concept here).
A lot of early cyberpunk also works because the authors were explicitly following noir/hardboiled styles, which are pretty straightforward and easy to "hang a story" on to. Some of the weaker sci-fi I've read fails to have any coherent structure and is instead just a jumble of random (but interesting) ideas.
It won't, sorry. A lot of 70s-80s sci has aged really badly - not because of technology turning out differently but because the stories were built around stock characters that were cliches at the time they were written.
I also found ringworld pretty unreadable. But I guess thats mostly because I find the world that is being built too hilarious and unbelievable. It lacks a sort of seriousness that cyberpunk usually doesn't.
This didn't start with cyberpunk, though. In fact it is a hallmark of your average pulp-era SF story to abuse neologisms mercilessly (often in combination with Deus Ex Machina and other cliches).
The New Wave in the 70s consciously broke with the past by (among other efforts) eschewing neologisms, but writers (and editors) in other periods/subgenres have, generally, gone for a balanced approach.
That "causal way" is one of my deep pleasures reading short stories. The format's constraints discourage authors from spelling everything out. Assumes reader is smart, leaves more to the imagination.
The opposite of Andy Weir's The Martian, which is the best technical manual I've ever read about potatoes.
The friend who introduced me to Gibson was also lyrical about the jet lag passage, but I remember thinking that traveling North-South would be a counter example. Anyway, it is well written.