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. Neuromancer is one of my all-time favorite books, I love it.īut after re-reading the 1986 “sequel” I will join many other reviewers in stating that Count Zero is actually the better written novel. 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. The super rich are not even human, so far removed from ordinary circumstances and from the constraints of mortality. 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. Gibson also demonstrates his remarkable skill at depicting corporate espionage amidst an anarcho-capitalistic world dominated by multi-national corporations. 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. 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.īut 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 coolest thing about reading Gibson is jacking in to his urbane and hip way of descriptive narration.

Count zero by william gibson