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Count Zero

The coolest thing about reading Gibson is jacking in to his urbane and hip way of descriptive narration.  William Gibson, as prophet of cyber punk and also as the herald of his later Blue Ant works, returns to The Sprawl for a continuation of the setting he began in his masterwork,  Neuromancer .  But like many of his books, this sequel is only that in regard to a return to the original setting, Count Zero works as a stand alone. The Sprawl, the megalopolis formed by the Eastern United States, from Boston to Atlanta, is his futuristic, over population setting where artificial intelligence spooks the Matrix, where cowboy hackers can jack into cyberspace and where corporate mercenaries compete in clandestine adventures.  Gibson also demonstrates his remarkable skill at depicting corporate espionage amidst an anarcho-capitalistic world dominated by multi-national corporations. Count Zero also explores the results of unrestrained individual wealth in a global economy and wealth as an analog for a new aristocracy as corporations melded into capitalistic clans. The super rich are not even human, so far removed from ordinary circumstances and from the constraints of mortality.  Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (completed in 1988 with  Mona Lisa Overdrive ) bridges the cyberpunk genre from the release of Bladerunner to the beginning of The Matrix films and is the cornerstone of this sub-genre.  *** 2022 rearead –   Neuromancer is one of my all-time favorite books, I love it.  But after re-reading the 1986 “sequel” I will join many other reviewers in stating that Count Zero is actually the better written novel.  I still love Neuromancer, still one of my all-time favs – it is raw and energetic like the garage band origins of a great rock show. Count Zero is from a writer with some street cred, a little more polished, a little more intricacy and with some more diesel in the tank.  A sequel in that it is in the same “Sprawl” universe and shares with its predecessor some of the same cyberspace themes, this also made me think of the review that describes Gibson’s writing as “high tech – low life”. This is crime writing hardwired and jacked in.  Speaking of crime writing, let me here emphasize and highlight a great character who was also in Neuromancer and is apparently also in the third book, Mona Lisa Overdrive. I’m talking about The Finn. In crime literature parlance, the Fence is where the rubber meets the road. This is the bridge between the shady underworld of crime and the “respectable” market. Think of Dickens’ Fagan and you know that you’ve got to have a good fence in the lineup. The Finn is all that and a bag of chips – bio chips that is.  Great fun, I’m upping this to 4 stars and on to Mona Lisa Overdrive.

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