Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson

4 stars

First Sentence: The ghost was her father’s parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita.

Thoughts: After the confusing morass that was Count Zero Gibson refinds his footing with Mona Lisa Overdrive, a fitting conclusion to the Sprawl trilogy. All our old favorites are back for one last hurrah. Except that one guy. He got married and has four kids now. Good for That One Guy.

Angie Mitchell is now a Sense/Net star. Like 90% of celebrities in the 1980s she’s recently out of rehab for drug addiction and is coming to terms with life without the loas. Then one contacts her out of nowhere to warn her that someone is out to get her. Someone she knows, but who? [ominous chord, crack of thunder, manaical laughter]

Meanwhile, in Dog Solitude, Slick Henry finds himself with a comatose man on his hands. The local underworld boss Kid Afrika wants Henry to keep this man and his nurse, Cherry, hidden in The Factory for a few weeks. Henry agrees, but he knows that there’s going to be trouble when The Factory Owner, Gentry, finds out. He’s not wrong.

Back in the first sentence, Kumiko has been sent to London by her father, the head of the Yakuza, to keep her out of the way in the upcoming underworld war. She’s not sure how she feels about this so she consults the ghost her father gave her. The ghost is a holographic simulation of an English boy that calls itself Colin. It advises Kumiko to keep her eyes and ears open, which she does. She realizes the only person who cares at all about her is the weird silver-eyed woman named Sally, a fighter with shady friends….wait. Is it? Can it be? Yes! It’s Molly! Hey, Molly! Great to see you again. Whose ass are you going to kick this time?*

Meanwhile Mona hates living in Florida because she’s a person with her head screwed on straight.** Her boyfriend/pimp Eddy is getting her out, though. Not because he has any strong feelings about America’s Wang, he just has a new job for Mona. But first, a little plastic surgery. See, Mona looks like Angie Mitchell, but she doesn’t look enough like her. Mona is excited because she loves Angie’s Sense/Net programs but she isn’t sure she wants to look exactly like her.

While all this is going on in the physical world, things are shaking up in the Matrix as well. The AI of Neuromancer created the loas of Count Zero and now they’re about to join with a third cyberpresence to create something new. And it all hinges on Angie. But first she has to find out where Bobby’s hiding himself these days so she can get into the Matrix with him before it all goes (more) haywire (than it already has).

*Everyone’s.

**Florida has too many bugs. And humidity. And gators. And Florida People.

Count Zero, William Gibson

2.5 stars

First Sentence: They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.

Thoughts: The Sprawl series hits its sophomore slump in Count Zero. Instead on focusing on one group of characters, this time we have three different plots that are supposed to fit together at the end but don’t.

The first plot is about Turner. He’s a mercenary for Hosaka Corporation who gets blown up in the first paragraph. The various bits of him are rescued and put back together in the Chiba City labs. Once he’s back together he goes to Mexico to recuperate. There he meets a nice lady and has a relationship with her. Then a Hosaka corporate ship appears on the horizon. Turns out the nice lady was actually a corporate psych and she’s just released Turner back to active duty. And what is that duty? Go to Arizona to pick up a scientist who’s defecting from Maas Biolabs. This particular scientist, Mitchell, has developed a biochip that will allow people to access the Matrix without a cyberdeck. Off Turner goes to the Arizona desert to meet his motley crew.

The second story is about Marly, a disgraced Parisian art dealer. She was in all the newsfeeds recently when she got caught selling a counterfeit collage box. Now she has a chance at a new job hunting down a mysterious artist who creates anonymous collage boxes. Her new employer is notorious billionaire Herr Josef Virek. Virek only meets Marly in a reality he’s constructed within the Matrix for the excellent reason that his physical form is a pile of goo in a vat in the vast metropolis of Undisclosed Location. Marly takes the job and quickly realizes that Virek’s motives for finding the artist are increasingly sinister.

The third plot is about Count Zero himself. His real name is Bobby Newmark and he’s a teenager in over his head. He wants to be a cyber cowboy and now, thanks to his contact Two-a-Day, he has his first job cracking corporate ice. Unfortunately it goes bad and Bobby dies. Fortunately his death was noted by something within the Matrix and it revives him. Now Bobby’s on the run because he knows the company he tried to hack knows what he did and where he lives. His fears are confirmed when the apartment complex he lived in blows up shortly after he leaves. He goes into the slums of New Jersey to find Two-a-Day and ask him what the hell. When he finds him, Two-a-Day is very nervous and not because of the two crimelords in his apartment with him. They want to talk to Bobby about the voice that revived him. Why? Because the voice was one of the loas that have appeared in the Matrix.

These plots meander around separately until Angela Mitchell shows up. She’s the daughter of the defecting scientist in Arizona. Turns out her father never planned to get out himself, he just wanted to get Angie away from Maas Biolabs. He had implanted his biochips in her brain, which gives her strange powers as far as the Matrix goes. For instance, she can connect with the loas that the bosses that caught Bobby are interested in. Eventually Turner, Angie, and Bobby end up in New York to find out more about the gods in the machine while Marly goes to the Spire from Neuromancer where she supposedly ties up a few loose ends from the rogue AI plot. According to legend, this is where the three plots all snap together but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how.

Neuromancer, William Gibson

5 stars

First Sentence: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Thoughts: Case was once a hotshot cyber-cowboy, able to jack into the Matrix and steal data from anyone, anywhere. Then he got greedy and his bosses burnt him out so he couldn’t connect to the Matrix anymore. Now he lives in Chiba City dealing (and doing) drugs and selling contraband on the street. Then he noticed a weird woman with silver eyes who kept following him wherever he went. He thought he got away until he went back to his coffin room. She was waiting for him there. She introduced herself as Molly and told him her boss, Armitage, wanted to meet him.

Armitage gave Case an offer he couldn’t refuse: surgery to rebuild his shattered nervous system so he could jack in again. Oh, and to replace his pancreas since it was shot from all the drugs he was taking. Once he recovered, Case would repay him by running the greatest heist of all time: liberating an AI from corporate captivity.

Molly and Case build up a team in the real world and the Matrix from their former friends and colleagues. They traveled around the globe and into space, running minor heists in both worlds until they were ready for the final job at the home of the Tessier-Ashpools who run the corporation keeping the AI prisoner. Then Wintermute, the AI, got involved itself.

It’s a fun sci-fi adventure that has aged both well and poorly. Gibson mentioned in the introduction that the lack of cell phones was a major flaw, especially since pay phones play a key role in a couple of crucial scenes. But who could have predicted smartphones in 1984? In the world of the novel, the pay phones make sense. It’s not “now,” but a fictional “now” based in the early 1980s. Gibson is not Nostradamus. Of course, Nostradamus wasn’t Nostradamus either, so there’s that. In any case, the novel is also a warning about relying too much on technology. Maybe, by the time we have AI like in the book, we won’t have destroyed the natural world so that the skies are still blue instead of staticky.