Rating: WARTY!
This was another audiobook. I'd read and enjoyed Neuromancer a long time ago, and Gibson followed-up with this sequel, the second in his so-called 'sprawl trilogy' but even though I also read this one, I could not remember what happened in it! That ought to have warned me right there. This one started out well enough, but after the first ten percent or so, it devolved into the most tedious rambling imaginable, and I couldn't stand to listening to it any more.
I found myself phasing it out of my consciousness, and focusing on other things instead. Since I typically only listen to audiobooks when driving, I'm used to focusing on other things, namely traffic, but I always come back to the book - it's always there on the periphery even if I'm focused on some traffic situation, but in this case it disappeared and I didn't miss it! It was minutes later that I recalled I was supposed to be listening to it, which is a sure sign the author has lost me as an audience and it's time to return this to the library and let someone else suffer through it!
The sequel to this, and the closing volume of the trilogy is Mona Lisa Overdrive, which is an awesome name for a novel - as good as Neuromancer, so I will give that a try if the library has it. Again, I've read it before, but I barely remember it, so I'm not optimistic about liking that after this experience.
Gibson's problem is that his books now seem awfully dated. They're set in a high-tech future, but now have the same quaintness that those 'predictive' books of the nineteen-fifties had: so optimistic about technology, but so wrong about how it came to be and how it's been applied. Gibson's future is relentlessly negative, which hasn't come to be and most likely will not, unless climate changed brings us down badly. He thought we'd be getting our news by fax instead of through cell phones! His future hasn't heard of personal communication devices or anything like the world wide web.
He has medical science making huge leaps in body repair and enhancement, which is slowly coming to pass, but while he futuristically has people jacking into 'cyberspace' directly, instead of interfacing through keyboards and monitors, he has them completely unprotected against viruses and worms. This isn't credible. Neither is it credible that anyone would put their brain at risk like that unless they were nuts to begin with. On the other side of the coin, he does see corporate globalization as being troublesome, but I think Melissa Scott does a better job of visualizing the future in her Trouble and Her Friends than Gibson does in anything he's written (that I've read).
The story began interestingly enough with a mercenary by the name of Turner, being blown-up and rebuilt. He's recuperating with a fine girlfriend, but he doesn't realize she's been paid to nursemaid him until Conroy shows up. An old colleague, Conroy wants Turner's help in extracting a member of one global corporation and delivering him to work for a rival company. Meanwhile, the standard Gibson style hacker, Bobby Newmark, the Count Zero of the title, almost dies when trying out some new software. He's saved by the daughter of the man who Turner and Conroy are trying to extract. Her name is Angie Mitchell, and she has the ability to "jack in" to cyberspace without a jack.
As you can see, Gibson's work has heavily influenced what came afterwards, notably, the Matrix trilogy of movies, and the Thirteenth Floor movie which got very little traction, but which is a favorite of mine. The problem with him, for me, is that he's pretty much remained static, with his one-hit wonder, Neuromancer, the only thing to have honestly impressed me of all he's written, and a large part of that was Molly Millions, aka Sally Shears, who makes only the briefest of appearances in this middle volume before playing a larger role in the finale.
I can't recommend this one, though.
