Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Voyager
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780006480426ISBN:000648042X
Description: Good. Our aim is to create value for our customers through the provision of low cost, affordable products and an overall satisfying buying experience. read more
Description: Acceptable. Ships from the UK. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Your purchase also supports literacy charities. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Grafton, London, United Kingdom
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780586071212ISBN:0586071210
Description: Crisp, Steve. Very Good. 4 1/2 " By 7 1/2" Light reader wear, rubbs to spine and cover edges, light creasing to spine, light tanning to page edges, No marks or inscriptions to pages. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Grafton, London
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780586071212ISBN:0586071210
Description: Crisp, Steve. Near Fine. 4 1/2 " By 7 1/2" Very minor cover edge wear, very minor creasing to spine, light shelf wear to page edges otheriwse No marks or inscriptions to pages. -----------------We have 15, 000+ Science Fiction / Fantasy going back to the 1920's in stock of which only a fraction are on our database, So we invite your wants lists......."The second book in the "Neuromancer" trilogy, offers more adventures inside and outside the matrix, and narrated in a futuristic slang. The ... read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Ace Books
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780441117734ISBN:0441117732
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Creasing to spine. Rubbing and shelf wear. No Writing. No Highlighting. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 256 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: ACE BOOKS
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780441117734ISBN:0441117732
Description: Published by Ace Books in 1987. Paperback. Number of pages: 256. Condition: Acceptable. Reading copy ONLY Shipped from UK. Delivery is usually 2-3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail. read more
Edition: 21st
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Ace, N. Y.
Date Published: 1987
Description: Cover Art. Reading Copy. No Jacket. Paperback. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. Reading copy is rated from good to very fine.........The book may have minor flaws that may have gone unnoticed... read more
"Classic sci-fi in the cyberpunk mould, second in the groundbreaking series beginning with Neuromancer and ending with Mona Lisa Overdrive; however, Count Zero, as the other books, stands alone. Set in the same future post-war dystopic milieu, this story weaves together the tales of Bobby, Marly and Turner. Bobby is a traveller in the matrix, a cyberspace jockey who is drawn into a plot by mysterious cyber-Voodooists to recover some missing software; Marly is co-opted by Josef Virek, an incalculably rich man who is kept alive in a big vat somewhere in Switzerland, to locate a strangely beautiful artwork's creator; Turner is employed by the shadowy Hosaka Corporation to help genius bioware designer Mitchell defect from the equally shadowy and powerful Maas Biolabs.
Themes of human/technology interface, corporate power, urban decay, trust, paranoia, the return of the past, are treated in a prose style and collection of images reminiscent of Burroughs, Dick, Ballard, Bradbury and Pynchon: tropes of mysticism and overarching systems that shape perception give an unsettling poetry to the narrative.
Gibson deals with emotion in a way that is unusual in science fiction. While this may not always be desirable (the job of characterisation in sci-fi differs from that in other genres), Gibson mostly achieves a convincing tying-together of motivation and plot direction.
Having read this, and Neuromancer before it, I am eager to read the last book in the trilogy. I recommend Count Zero to anyone who enjoys science fiction stories for the way they tell us about the present and the near future and show entertainingly and convincingly how humans deal with the cultural shifts and moral complexities brought about by major technological change."
"My problem with a lot of genre fiction is that when not wholly unimaginative, it is often too restrained and quasi-literary to take full advantage of the opportunities open to it. Not so here. Gibson shows a rare willingness to plunge as far into his crazed techno-mythology as I could reasonably hope. Haitian gods manifesting (or seeming to manifest) in lost corners of the internet, megacorporations more powerful than nations which have all but ceased to exist, rewired brains and bodies, and pilgrimage to the broken chapels of scuttled spacecraft. Some definite plots holes and inconsistencies, but this is first-rate pulp anyway, lurching directly between startling inventions and pushing creative license as far as needed."
"The writing's tight, the proposed future is sufficiently realized and stylized, all gritty and noir, but it just leaves me cold. Characterization seemed to be lacking, and I just didn't much care what happened to anyone in the end, whereas I very much did with Neuoromancer, which seemed a much more fully-realized novel to me. Maybe I've just run into Gibson a bit too late, at a time when he seems less visionary and more obvious in light of how technology has advanced. His strengths as far as whizbang futurism seem less evident to me here, and his weaknesses in character and relationships much more pronounced."
"I would perhaps complain that the ending was a bit to deus ex machina for my taste, but then the entire book is wound around the theme of god being in the machine. From the vodou loa who seemingly possess various characters and steer the entire plot; to the mad European trillionare who has reached near immortality through preservation vats and virtual reality; to the insane former net cowboy who now believes he has found god in the random yet deeply moving works of art created by long abandoned industrial robot; everything in Count Zero is about god, machines, and that perhaps the line between the two is not so clear.
Then again, Neuromancer was largely about sentient AI, and how if computers and the net become omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, that is pretty much the definition of God. I personally enjoyed Neuromancer a bit more, simply because I like the question of god to remain fuzzy, for the factor of faith to blur the interpretation of what occurs -- both see the same bolt of lightening, but to the atheist the lightening is just a meteorological, to the believer, it is a sign from above. In Count Zero the loas seem to actually haunt the net and actually seem to sculpt the events in the book. It could be that they are merely highly advanced AI manifesting as African gods, but Gibson seems to lean a bit more towards the divine here.
That said, Gibson is perhaps one of the best stylists writing sci-fi. I love the genre, but read less of it than I might like simply because the prose in most sci-fi is mediocre, if not down-right bad. There is this generic, functional "sci-fi voice" that the majority of "good" SF writers fall into, where the sentences and paragraphs are merely scaffolds to prop up their ideas: whatever intriguing plot they've devises, some moral or spiritual crisis explored through technology or alien species. As long as the ideas are good enough, I don't usually mind, and that's what SF tends to be about, both for the authors and their audience -- ideas. It doesn't matter that Canticle for Lebowitz, Anvil of Stars, or I, Robot all sound about the same, because the ideas are fascinating and hold you spell-bound.
Gibson, on the other hand, has ideas that grab you and prose can make you pause and re-read a sentence. He can craft brilliant, even quotable lines, and shift his style to near stream-of-consciousness to show the mind-blowing effects of hitting black ice, being drugged, or having one's memory artificially restored. He throws around lingo and slang just to the edge of being pretentious without (usually) falling over, with the effect of having a living, breathing world whose dirt and grime are familiar enough to make it immediate and real, yet just alien enough to be the exotic future.
Well, on to Mona Lisa Overdrive, then I can review the entire Sprawl Trilogy."
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