William Gibson can write. I keep exploring this in different ways and different words as I read through Gibson’s oeuvre, but in the end it comes down to two appropriately alliterative words: William Gibson has voice and vision. He has a way with language that not every writer, even really good ones, ever manages to master. He knows how to use and manipulate words and phrases to create cultures. With this talent, he creates novels that conjure up pocket universes of our future.Count Zero is much more spiritual and emotionally evocative than its predecessor, Neuromancer. There are three main characters and three intertwined plots. Turner is a mercenary hired to manage the defection of a scientist from one transnational to another, but he ends up with the scientist’s daughter instead. Bobby, who is attempting to establish himself as a console cowboy by the name of “Count Zero”, finds himself neck-deep in a situation far more serious than he ever desired to encounter. And Marly is a curator hunting up the provenance of an intrigue art object at the behest of a reclusive collector. At the risk of sounding reductionist, the three plotlines conveniently symbolize three of the primary themes in Count Zero: a weary mercenary confronting the emptiness of his chosen profession; a new, untested youth struggling with his coming-of-age; and a young woman pulled inexorably deeper into the grey and black areas of the art world, pulled by a man who is not entirely human anymore.So there is no denying that Count Zero is a complex book, when one really stops to consider everything that happens in it. The language that Gibson uses can often conceal this fact, because sometimes it is difficult to follow the train of the story (or at least, I found this to be the case). There is a lyrical, almost dream-like quality to his prose; I encountered this in some of his other novels, but it seems particularly noticeable in this one. Sometimes this vagueness is advantageous. For example, Gibson does not go into detail when he explains how the consensual illusion that is cyberspace is generated, nor how the “decks” that console cowboys use work. This lends a timeless quality to the setting (though his use of the term tapes stands out as an exception).With that in mind, then, I don’t see Count Zero as the best or the easiest of Gibson’s novels. But that’s almost like saying The Tempest is neither the best nor the easiest of Shakespeare’s plays—this is still a fine book. In particular, I love the hints and whispers at post/trans-humanism that permeate the story. They never quite overwhelm the narrative (Gibson’s vagueness can also be a consequence of the fact that he is so damned subtle). Yet they crop up at the most interesting moments. In Neuromancer Gibson raised questions regarding how an AI that is essentially an alien being would co-exist with humanity. He never quite re-visits the fate of the Neuromancer/Wintermute construct, but he drops all these tantalizing hints about strange things happening in cyberspace, not to mention the odd god inhabiting space junk in orbit.On the other side of the divide, we have humans like Turner or Angela or even Bobby, people who have jacks that allow them to download data directly into their brain. I honestly don’t know why N. Katherine Hayles has had such an effect on me, since I only ever read a single article by her so far—but I keep seeing the motif of embodiment show up all the time in my posthuman fiction. Turner might be a cyborg, and his body might recently have undergone dramatic reconstructive surgery. But he still has a body. And so, unlike the shady Josef Virek, who is more of a construct than a human being any more, Turner is still human—or at least, seems to perform as human in a way that satisfies the rest of us. Gibson is good at asking these questions without beating them over our heads. There is a refreshing lack of pretentiousness to books like Count Zero, even as they force us to think about difficult ideas.The second instalment in the Sprawl trilogy also recalls Gibson’s post-national corporate-driven vision of the future. In this case, it’s tech giants Hosaka and Maas Industries competing for a brilliant researcher by the name of Mitchell. He has been developing revolutionary biochip technology for Maas, but now apparently he wants to defect to Hosaka. This little game of industrial brinksmanship has its precedent in present-day industry, of course, but I suspect that few companies go to the lengths that Hosaka does, hiring mercenaries and a medical team to extract any destructive implants Maas might have installed to dissuade Mitchell from walking. In this future, the companies might not own you outright, but they almost certainly own you in any way that matters. And this vision has never been more compelling, because as Gibson himself has famously said, “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed”. I can’t speak to what Gibson had in mind when he wrote Count Zero or what contemporary readers might have imagined, but it certainly resonates with some of the events that are happening globally today, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and, in general, the growing awareness that corporations have a great deal of influence in the political process.Although not my favourite aspect of Count Zero, its spiritual component deserves consideration as well. Science and secularism seems to go hand-in-hand these days. Certainly, I consider science’s foundation on rational principles one of the influences on my transition to agnosticism and eventually atheism as I grew to adulthood. Yet this partnership has not, historically, always been the case. Science and spirituality have a much longer history, and many science fiction authors acknowledge this fact. In this book, some of the minor characters are involved in a techno-voodoo worship of loa that inhabit cyberspace. These loa manifest at unpredictable moments and “ride” a chosen human body, a point that becomes important at the climax of the novel. Gibson declines to pull back the curtain and explain the true nature of the loa (there are certainly hints that they are related to an AI or even to Neuromancer/Wintermute itself). So it’s a worthwhile question: regardless of the existence of an actual deity, what are we going to encounter if we continue to create and inhabit digital spaces? What will happen as we allow programs to go feral, to roam, and to mix code in unpredictable ways?I don’t always love Gibson’s novels, but I do always appreciate them. Quality triumphs over quantity, and while Gibson has not been as prolific as some of his contemporaries, his novels are always worth reading. He has a grasp on the ways in which technology challenges and changes our society, the ways we react to these changes and initiate our own. His characters feel real and always have interesting, diverse voices, whether it’s Turner, Bobby, or even a minor character like the Finn. Gibson provides a general vocabulary and dialect, but inflection and idiom are always the character’s own. Such attentiveness! Such style! Count Zero is interesting and cool, and it’s a well-written piece of science fiction. Although it did not quite manage to capture and hold my attention like Pattern Recognition did, I still enjoyed it thoroughly.My reviews of the Sprawl trilogy:← Neuromancer | Mona Lisa Overdrive →
Following the resounding success of my Locus Quest, I faced a dilemma: which reading list to follow it up with? Variety is the spice of life, so I’ve decided to diversify and pursue six different lists simultaneously. This book falls into my FINISHING THE SERIES! list.I loves me a good series! But I'm terrible for starting a new series before finishing my last - so this reading list is all about trying to close out those series I've got on the go...A quick look at the numbers...Why is it that Neuromancer, the first book in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, has 137,000 ratings on Goodreads - but Count Zero , the second book, has just 22,000 - and the third book, Mona Lisa Overdrive, just 17,000?That's roughly 16% of Neuromancer readers following on to the next book and just 12% making it to the end of the series.You have to ask - why the big drop-off?The series scores reasonably well - between 3.8/3.9 - so it's not as if everyone is reading Neuromancer and saying "that was horrible, no more, please!" - although, I'll admit it does spark a greater love/hate split than most books. From what investigations I've had time to do, the more common attitude seems to be along the lines of "Wow. That was quite something. I'm glad I've read it, but I don't need to read any more. Job done."A thought on character... Count Zero isn't a direct sequel - it doesn't pick-up the same characters - but it's set in the same world, orbiting the same scene, with some common threads - but each stands alone perfectly well. For most series it's the characters which act as the hook, pulling you on. You want to read the next instalment to find out how they fare in their next adventure. Not the case here. Which, again, explains some of that drop-off rate. But even if Gibson had rejoined Case and co, I don't think everyone would have read on because character empathy is not his strong suit. Gibson is a stylist; a poetic, lyrical, idiosyncratic and wildly imaginative dreamer. He sketches out his anti-heroes with the minimum amount of effective brush-strokes, and animates his stories with a kinetic energy and effervescence that I find enthralling.Why not so good?Everything I love about Neuromancer is still present in Count Zero - but the story type isn't quite as suited to highlighting those strengths. Neuromancer is a heist story - and I have a special fondness for those. Heist's make criminals likeable, so they're a common lens for antihero crime tales - especially in cinema. For a classic heist tale, you collect your gang of crooks together, each bringing their own specialist skills, and set them a seemingly impossible job, which can only by overcome through careful co-operation and the whole becoming greater than the sum of the parts. Exact same formula as the classic 'gang on a quest' fantasy - and it works for Neuromancer. Count Zero is almost a portmanteau. Several unrelated characters, each with their own smaller adventure, are tied together by the ending and some thematic resonance. While I was reading it, I kept thinking that it actually made an easier introduction to Gibson's Sprawl than Neuromancer did. The characters are mostly 'innocents' - a newbie hacker, a betrayed art dealer, a genius daughter on the run... they're all being introduced to the grimey world of corporate war, cybercrime, and god-like ghosts in the machines getting cosy with the mob. But the portmanteau is a more artsy format, and coupled with Gibson's approach, for me, it ends-up a little too dilute. No one thread packs enough of a punch to deliver the killer blow, and the resonance between the threads isn't strong enough to compensate. But still pretty damn good?Hell yeah! My personal highlight was the mash-up of fragmented AI personae with voodoo loa (such as Baron Samedi)! Made me wonder how much influence Simmons drew from Gibson. I love the idea of "god-like" technological entities interpreting themselves as spiritual intermediaries with God. It's a concept with far greater scope than Gibson has chance to explore here.I have mixed feelings about the prominence of the corporate mercenary, Turner. He's the main driving force behind the plot action, but within his thread it's the scientist's daughter he rescues, Angie, who really keys into the common themes. Sadly she's massively overshadowed by Turner, which is part of the dissonance amongst the threads I alluded to earlier. But on the plus side, Turner is a very cool character in his own right and the primary inspiration (I would assume) behind Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovac books. So - swings and roundabouts, eh?No awards?Sadly not. Count Zero went up against Card's Speaker for the Dead (the sequel to Ender's Game) and it's hard to argue against that one. Speaker for the Dead is superb (I gave it 5 stars, hands-down) and it took both the Hugo and Nebula awards away from Count Zero .Carry on?Well, I clicked "buy, buy now!" for book 3 in the series, Mona Lisa Overdrive within about thirty seconds of finishing the book... so I think you can safely say I'm keen for the next instalment! But I'm pretty disciplined with my reading lists these days so I'll force myself to wait at last a month or two... but yeah... I'm definitely looking forward to it.After this I read: A Feast for Crows
What do You think about Count Zero (2006)?
This is the middle book of the Sprawl Trilogy by Gibson (in between Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive), and my absolute favorite. The other two are largely action-based, and this one had a lot of that but also a lot of beautiful descriptions, somewhat mystically-oriented plotlines, and it really drew me in, probably because I'm no stranger to cyberspace myself. I really loved the ending, so much that I re-read it twice before moving on."Bobby had been trying to chart a way out of this landscape since the day he was born, or anyway it felt that way.""As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.""Thrones and dominions,' the Finn said obscurely. 'Yeah, there's things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see? Sure, it's just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it's a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded.'""The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments.""Sprawltown's a twisty place, my man. Things are seldom what they seem.""My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells."
—Jenny (Reading Envy)
I'm intermingling my reading of the books in William Gibson's first two series ("The Sprawl" and "The Bridge"). This book, "Count Zero," is the second book in his first (the Sprawl) trilogy. Since I'm reading the books in an odd order, I'm noticing how I prefer Gibson's earlier work to the later. So far, even though the writing is very similar in both series, the older (Sprawl) books remain on target much better than the books in the later series (i.e., here, Gibson doesn't get side-tracked describing his vision at the expense of the story). "Count Zero," like the others, is well-written and very interesting. It continues from the basis of the concluding events in "Neuromancer." But, that continuation is more of an addition to a framework instead of the continuation of a story. In other words, the books can be read independently. The only issues I have with the book are with the namesake title character, Count Zero. First, he's a pretty flawed character. But, more to the point, Gibson has some trouble keeping his speech in line with his education and background. Usually, his speech and understanding are less than stellar. But occasionally, he'll start describing things as though he were an expert (for example, his description of a phone interface in "Jammers" near the end). Those aren't big issues. So, I'm happy to rate the book at a solid Very Good 4 stars out of 5.The books in Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy are:1. Neuromancer2. Count Zero3. Mona Lisa OverdriveThe books in Gibson's Bridge Trilogy are:1. Virtual Light2. Idoru3. All Tomorrow's Parties
—David
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.
—Lyn
