The Doll by Taylor Stevens

Title: The Doll
Author: Taylor Stevens
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

So why would a nation which overthrew the monarchy sport a publishing company called Crown Publishing? Another mystery for Vanessa Michael Munroe to crack?! This novel, published by Crown, is the third in an ongoing series of which Munroe is the main character. Note that I haven't read the previous two. The back-cover blurb compares Munroe with Lisbeth Salander of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo fame, but apart from the fact that both were abused when they were younger, they have absolutely zero in common. Let this be a warning to all who do not self-publish: there is no limit whatsoever to the stupid things your publisher will lard your novel up with, and no end to how misleading back-cover blurbs can be! Those blurbs are not there for your guidance or for your education; they're there for one purpose and for one purpose only: to trick you into buying the novel! Fortunately, since I borrowed this from the library, I was far more willing to take a risk, so it wasn't an issue for me

There is some prior history going on with this volume, but it's almost completely irrelevant to the story told here as far as I can see, so if you picked this up out of order, as I did (and there is no indication on the cover to tell a prospective reader that this is "Book x of the Blah Blah series") you won't miss anything. Plus, it's blessedly told in third person (maybe the fourth in this series will be told in the fourth person? Hmm!), so there's none of that absurd and obsessively self-important "I did..., then I did..., then I wanted to..., then I saw...." garbage to wade through.

This volume doesn't even open with the main character except in that her colleague (and romantic interest, evidently) at a private security company observes her being tranquilized and kidnapped from the parking lot as she comes in to work. He's so incompetent that he can't do anything about it! As they try to trace who took Munroe, we meet her in person in the company of her foreign and very callous kidnappers, from somewhere in central Europe. She's required by these people to transport a "package" from A to B, or her brother Logan (no, it's not The Wolverine!) will be hurt even more than he was hurt already when they kidnapped him. The package is also kidnapped. She's a young, Hollywood celebrity: Neeva Eckridge who, we're told is the daughter of a US senator, but no one seems to know this? I don't buy that something like that would never have been ferreted out by the media. Or that someone would be so stupid as to try and kidnap a celebrity of her stature for his own personal use.

I picked up this novel because I was interested in Munroe, but the chapters roughly alternate between her and her partner, Bradford, who was completely uninteresting to me. I started skipping any chapter in which he was featured, and honestly didn't feel that I missed anything! What does that say about one third of this novel?! I got everything I needed from spending my time only with Munrow and Eckridge. I found their relationship fascinating - one kidnappee effectively forced to kidnap the other and take her across Europe to Monaco! Not that this made any sense whatsoever.

I was interested because I don't recall reading a story of this nature before. It was (to me) a really good and intriguing idea; it didn't develop in the way I had thought (and hoped) it might, though, and the ending really was pathetic and inexplicable. Plus Stevens left way too many loose threads to carry over into the next volume - just like she left some from the previous volume carrying over into this one. The main loose thread was Kate Breeden, apparently a friend of Munroe's from earlier adventures, but who betrayed Munroe and got herself jailed, then betrayed her further, from inside the jail - and then escaped from jail to no doubt reappear in Volume 4. That did nothing for me save inflict a mild feeling of déjà saturé (already nauseous). I only mention this because it's important for the ending (not my nausea; the fact that Munroe did not terminate Breeden with extreme prejudice in whatever earlier volume she'd had the chance to do so).

There is very little exchange between the two kidnap victims to the point where they start their road trip, and not a whole heck of a lot afterwards, unfortunately. That's' what I'd been looking forward to, and I didn't get it! Eckridge's new "captor" is more interested in how to get out of this mess, obviously, but there is an added twist in that one of Munroe's kidnappers, a younger man, the nephew of the man who orchestrated all of this, seems to be developing some remote low-level feelings for Munroe. He and a heavy (conveniently the one against whom Munroe has a grudge) are following their victims, observing them from out of sight, tracking their every movement, and controlling those movements by means of text messages to a phone Munroe is carrying. Plus both Munroe and Eckridge have their clothing bugged as well as the cheap crappy car in which they are traveling, and as well as the phone they were issued to stay in touch with the kidnappers.

I enjoyed this cat and mouse, finding it entertaining, and I was interested in how Munroe was going to get out of it. The problem is that she didn't. She made no attempt whatsoever during the two sleepless days of the trip to communicate anything to Eckridge about her plans or her reasons for doing what she was doing. Thus when Eckridge tried to make a run for it, I had thought the two of them had planned it when they were out of earshot of their trackers, using a noisy rest room. They had not. Eckridge was going it alone, and Munroe used this attempt to procure for herself a cell phone, which she then used to send her partner Bradford some text messages communicated in Morse code (since the car was bugged and she couldn't tell him everything in plain English). Superficially, this seems ingenious, but it's really stupid given that Munroe could have simply (and in Eckridge's ignorance) turned on the phone, called Bradford's number, and then simply engaged Eckridge in a conversation explaining to her where exactly they were and what was going on - fooling the kidnappers into thinking she was educating Eckridge, when she was really cluing-in Bradford.

There was an interesting problem from the writing perspective here. On p139, Stevens writes: "Bradford lay back on the sofa, head to one side...". When I reached that point I had thought it meant his head was turned to one side, but Stevens finished the sentence: "...feet to the other..." Obviously he was laying down length-wise on the sofa, but the way Steven phrased it robbed me of that understanding to begin with. Why did she choose to say "head to one side", rather than "head to one end"? I don't know. It's just another thing which can trip-up your narrative flow, and let your reader stumble. It's very minor - the rest of Stevens's writing is quite acceptable, so I wouldn't fault her for this. It's just one thing, but something for which a writer needs to be constantly vigilant when putting words on paper. Which, of course, reminds me of a Monty Python sketch (as so most things!). As John Cleese put it, "Ah, well, I don't want you to get the impression it's just a question of the number of words! I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important." I can't add anything to that. And now let's go straight over to James Gilbert at Leicester....

Anyway, in conclusion I'm going to have to rate this warty, because there were problems and the ending was a disaster in more ways than one. One problem, for example, was that Eckridge did not even realize that Munroe was a woman until a day into their trip! Now admittedly, Munroe was inexplicably disguised as a guy for the trip, but really? They had been living in each other's laps, talking from time to time, and using the rest room together for a day, and Eckridge never figured out the obvious? Nor did Stevens communicate Eckridge's knowledge deficit to the reader in way way, shape, or form! The ending? It was not only unsatisfactory, it was downright stupid. Let me give one spoiler. In the closing chapters, and knowing that Kate Breeden - whom she let live in an earlier volume - has totally screwed her over and caused deaths in doing so, Munroe then blithely chooses to let one of her kidnappers live, when the smart thing to do, and especially to do in light of her gross error of judgment with Breeden, would be to kill him.

She fails, and with that (and other issues), so, too, does this novel. I don't want to hear how tough, and mean, and decisive, and can-do, and feisty, and Salander-like she is and then find out she has let two dangerous people live, the second one in full knowledge of what a deadly mistake she'd made by letting the first one live. Her interaction with this kidnapper guy reminded me of that Woody Allen line in what, for me, is his best movie: Annie Hall when he does battle with two spiders in Annie's bathroom, armed with nothing more than a large tennis raquet, and she's crying over her sad life when he returns. Thinking she's upset about the passing of the arachnid couple, he asks her, "What did you want me to do, capture and rehabilitate them?"

I am the first to admit that trite, happy endings are never good, and even decent happy endings are sometimes not as good as a sad ending, but for Stevens to end this one the way she did turned me right off. If it were not for the crappy way she rolled this up, with so many loose threads the pages were almost falling out of the binding, I might have been willing to give this a 'worthy' rating, but given the totality of what I had to deal with here, I'm rating it warty, and advising you that I have no plans whatsoever to read any more of this series which is sad, 'cause I could have used another really good femme fatale in my life!

The Genesis Secret by Tom Knox

Title: The Genesis Secret
Author: Tom Knox
Pages: 369

Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WARTY!
Perspective: third person past

Note: SPOIL HEAPS!

Tom Knox is the pseudonym of a journalist named Sean Thomas, which begs the question as to why he isn't using his real name. He's had several 'international best sellers' (although what that means in practice, I have no idea!), so you’d think he'd be proud! Oh well!

The Genesis Secret is another in a long line of secret religion thrillers/horrors by various authors. Since I have no beliefs in any gods or demons, you might think that I wouldn’t be interested in these stories. I have no belief in space alien visitations or witches or wizards either, but I still will read those stories if they tell a good tale. It’s all fiction to me!

The Genesis secret in which Turkish Kurd meets British Way, starts off with the obligatory religiously-oriented evil murders with bodily mutilations and arcane messages, in this case carved into the flesh of the victims. We meet Mark Forrester, a London detective who is trying to solve these murders and is literally without a clue. We also meet Rob Luttrell, a journalist who is taking a break from his almost-demolition by a bomb in Iraq, to report on an archaeological dig in the Kurdish part of Turkey near a town called Sanliurfa.

The dig is real, the story is fiction. When he arrives, Luttrell meets a gorgeous young French woman of course (not of course she's French but of course she's young and gorgeous), Christine Meyer, who will be, doubtlessly, his love interest by the end of the novel. Telegraph much, Tom?!

The lead archaeologist dies killed horribly, right after some Kurds were seen by Luttrell and Meyer chanting an ancient curse by candle light under his window! The Kurds resent the archaeologists being there because although they're paid for their work on the dig, they feel their heritage is being dug up and exported to Turkey.

Meyer meets Luttrell and tells him that the murdered archaeologist, Breitner, had a secret notebook in which he wrote ideas he was entertaining. They go back to the dig to find the safe in which he kept it, but he safe is gone. As they get back into the Land Rover, Luttrell finds the notebook hidden in the back. They visit another of the dig team who confirms that the piece of grass they found in the notebook is einkorn wheat. Yes, he grassed him out!

Forrester visits Isle of Man to investigate a similar murder to the one in London. Still no real clues.

Luttrell and Meyer are trying to figure out Breitner's notebook, and it was obvious to me right from the start. In it there is a map of one river becoming four. Clearly this is the four rivers mentioned in Genesis in relation to the Garden of Eden, but neither Luttrell nor Meyer get it. Then there's the tree! They still don't get it. I Can se how Luttrell wouldn't; he's not orientated that way, but Meyer really has no excuse. Not only is she one of the archaeologists working on the project, she's also quite religious and knowledgeable enough to take Luttrell on a local tour of religious sites without a map! No excuse.

Sanliurfa is evidently the Garden of Eden. There are numbers, too, in the notebook, about which my first guess would be that they're Bible verse references. They take a trip out to Haran, a Biblically referenced village tied to Abram, and finally they visit some caves dedicated to the moon god, where evidently, human sacrifices were conducted, and Luttrell mentions that Abram was prepared to sacrifice his son. Then he finally gets the Bible references!

Forrester finally gets a lead: five men dressed as telecom workers were spotted in a field which is also an ancient site. Their vehicle is also spotted. News comes in that a similar crime was committed in new England. Meanwhile Forrester has researched ancient sacrifices and concluded that the Star of David is actually 'Solomon's star' and that these people, for some reason are into human sacrifice.

Luttrell finally tells Meyer that the numerical references are Bible verses. One of the Turkish police detectives visits them and tells them they need to leave Turkey otherwise they will find themselves in jail. They resolve to stay, of course.

Forrester finally gets a lead: five men dressed as telecom workers were spotted in a field which is also an ancient site. Their vehicle is also spotted. News comes in that a similar crime was committed in new England. Meanwhile Forrester has researched ancient sacrifices and concluded that the Star of David is actually 'Solomon's star' and that these people, for some reason are into human sacrifice. Really? Wow!

Luttrell finally tells Meyer that the numerical references are Bible verses. One of the Turkish police detectives visits them and tells them they need to leave Turkey otherwise they will find themselves in jail. They resolve to stay so they can break into the museum. Meyer can get the pass-codes from a guard who is hot for her, but instead of going during the daytime, on a holiday when every citizen of the town is fully occupied with festivities and they won;t even be noticed, they wait through all of that until it gets dark and very, very quiet, and then they break in. They find some jars containing infants which have evidently been stuffed into the jars alive and then allowed to suffocate - as a sacrifice. They're assailed and captured by a bunch of men, but as they're brought out of the museum, the Turkish cop shows up with a SWAT team (Why? How? We don't know!). He frees Luttrell and Meyer from the mob and puts them on a plane telling them to leave Turkey and to never return.

Forrester finally begins to get a clue. He's led by information to investigate highly educated young men who may have had trouble in their school or college and who have dropped out or gone AWoL recently. In this way he tracks down a family in central France which has some secrets. Their grandfather was a general in World War One who seemed fond of sacrificing his men to the German machine guns. They learn that there were also more ancient sacrifices made in this locale. But the young son whom the seek is not there.

Meanwhile, Luttrell and Meyer are pretty much just vacationing for ten days in Istanbul with a friend of Meyer's. No reason is given for their lolly-gagging in Istanbul, but we do learn that they've now become lovers (as was expected, you'll recall!). None of this is described; we hear of it only after the fact. Obviously they haven't yet left Turkey, but that's about to change.

Luttrell makes the manly decision that he must go alone to Lalesh, in Kurdish Iraq, the heart of the Yezidi religion (yes, real town, real religion). He asks Meyer to go back to London to keep an eye on his daughter for him. No explanation as to why she needs to do this is offered. His daughter is with his ex wife, and no threats have been offered to either party, but if Luttrell's newspaper stories have been noticed by the believers, they could, I guess, go after his family, in which case Meyer gets to be the saving hero, and Luttrell's ex becomes another victim? I'm guessing that's where this is going, because we certainly haven't had anywhere near enough horrific misery and gore yet in this novel!

Forrester finds another body, this one flayed alive. At this point I'm starting to wonder about Knox. It's like he's taken the most disgusting aspects of every barbaric religion that ever flourished and meshed them into one so he can be gross and nasty just for the sake of it. Of course, this does serve the double-purpose of his having a horrible tale to tell, and of exposing how utterly disgraceful religions have been throughout history. But then I knew that.

Meanwhile back with Luttrell, the story takes a sci-fi turn. Having spent another ten days in an Iraqi village fruitlessly trying to learn about the Yezidi religion, Luttrell is about to give up and go home when he's invited to Lalesh by a young Yezidi boy who educates him about their religion. He looks around Lalesh and spots some men sneaking into a hut, so he wraps a head scarf around his own face and sneaks in. No, they're not watching a stripper, they are venerating a skull which is very human looking, but not quite human enough: obviously, it’s an alien skull. Shades of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!

Luttrell feels a knife at his throat, has his head bagged, and is dragged into another room where he once again agonizes over the details of his inevitably forthcoming torture and murder. But as before, nothing happens. This is a bit tedious because Knox is so repetitive in this mode. In the end, Luttrell's Yezidi friend concludes that he should allow Luttrell to go free and hopefully his story will benefit the Yezidi and remove some of the devil-worship stigma from them.

Well I've abandoned this novel. As I expected, Christine and Luttrell's child Lizzie were both abducted, then we're treated to the most disgusting scene of Meyer's entrails being cooked while still attached to her, alive, then we find it wasn't actually her but Meyer's friend Isobel, and Meyer is really still alive, then Luttrell is forced to confront the psycho, and we see him disappear, shot and apparently dying, into the raging river. And the only reason I know that is because I skipped to the end to see what it was! I skipped the last hundred pages or so because at that point I couldn't stand to read this twaddle any more.

I'm sorry, but this novel which started out offering some hope of a decent religious mystery/thriller with a possible sci-fi connection just went to hell. Even the big mysterious skull is blown off completely, as indeed did the reader. This novel is crap And I'm sorry I wasted so much time trying to find something worthwhile in it.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Title: Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

No honest set of sci-fi book reviews could be called complete without a review of Neuromancer a novel often described as part of the 'sprawl trilogy', but which is really a tetralogy, starting with Burning Chrome, and followed by Johnny Mnemonic, Neuromancer, and Mona Lisa Overdrive (cool title, huh? it's also the name of an album by Buck-Tick, named after the novel).

Wikipedia’s page is a great overview and background story of Neuromancer

This story is about an AI called Wintermute, and Gibson’s novel relates how this AI manipulates humans into facilitating its being united with another AI called Neuromancer. So the novel really should have been called Wintermute, but that's no way as catchy as Neuromancer, the novel which fully gave birth to the concept of cyberspace, a term coined by Gibson in Burning Chrome. I think Neuromancer is where the Matrix movie trilogy people got the concept of the matrix, too.

He did a good job of creating a disturbing hi-tech future considering that this novel was, according to wikipedia, written in haste in 1984. It’s notoriously difficult to predict the future, particularly the future of the technology world, where the status quo undergoes routine paradigm shifts. Gibson got many things wrong - like indicating that megabyte memory was a valuable commodity, whereas just thirty years on we buy gigabyte drives for a few dollars and carry them around in our pockets!), but he made a believable if depressing world which seems very real. And in 1984, a megabyte was considered to be a massive amount of memory and extremely expensive.

Gibson has a way of telling the story as though he’s an acquaintance of yours, relating something he personally experienced; he has the facility of describing things which make them seem real and memorable after only a few words.

For me, the real protagonist (other than Neuromancer/Wintermute) in this story is Molly. She appears in each volume of Gibson’s sprawl tetralogy, although she’s had some cosmetic surgery and lives under the name of Sally Shears in Mona Lisa Overdrive where we see a different side to her. Her real name may be Rose Kolodny. Wikipedia describes her as “physically tough (but not instantly imposing)” and this is a great description. It’s implied in Neuromancer that she has her own medical team, which she sorely needs as it happens.

Molly is the one who tracks Case and brings him into the group which eventually frees Wintermute, an AI imprisoned in a mainframe owned by the powerful Tessier-Ashpool family. She has a close (and physical) relationship with Case, although she’s outta there like a cowboy riding off into the sunset at the end of the novel. This is funny because it’s Case who’s referred to as the cowboy riding ‘the boards’ throughout the novel. Molly could have her on TV Series à la Nikita; and who is to say that those Luc Besson movies (La Femme Nikita and Columbiana) weren't inspired by Neuromancer?

In a private conversation, Molly is the one who initially offers to team up with Case, and she asks him to look into the guy who hired them: Armitage, someone who she’s evidently been checking up on herself.

It’s this investigation which leads them to the truth about what Armitage is doing, and who is pulling his strings, and what Armitage actually is, for that matter. Armitrage is the one who knows how to free Case of the poison sacs in his body, which will render him back into the nerve-shattered useless hacker he was before he was picked up and fixed-up for this job.

Molly is a ‘razor girl’, referred to as ‘Steppin’ razor’ by the space-dwelling Rastas in Neuromancer. The reason for the name is the 4cm blades she’s had embedded into each finger (and thumb), which can slide in and out on command.

It’s one of many enhancements she’s had one to facilitate her profession, the most outwardly visible of which is having her eyes enclosed with mirrored lenses which enhance her vision (but which don’t seem to have any ‘heads-up’ style technology other than projecting the time in the corner of her field of view). With these, she can see in the dark, but she appears not to be able to detect infra red. For me, reading this for the first time when I was younger, this was a very cool piece of technology. In order to keep the lenses pristine, her tear ducts were re-routed into her mouth and she won’t let anyone touch the lenses. Hmm!

In Neuromancer, Molly’s first major assignment is to steal the Dixie Flatline, a stored copy of a deceased hacker's neural patterns, the help of which they supposedly need in order to take the next step in Wintermute’s plan. She uses underworld contacts to arrange for a distraction whilst she breaks in and successfully lifts the hacker’s imprint, but not before she has to take on a host of security guards and ends up with a broken leg for her trouble. The injury merely slows her down and is soon fixed with the advanced medical practices of the era, although it comes back to trouble her later.

Case’s role in this job is to run interference on the computer security systems, but a guy referred to consistently as ‘The Finn’ has enhanced both Molly herself, and Case’s systems. The result of this is that Case can ‘jack-in’ to her and see what she’s seeing, which is cool and intriguing, especially in how Gibson describes it, because what Case sees in his mind is what Molly is actually seeing through her lenses. The result is that Case is effectively riding inside Molly. It feels weird to him because she doesn’t walk like he does and he has absolutely no control over what she does or how she moves. 'Riding' Molly is like riding a roller-coaster!

At one point after this job, when Molly is sleeping and she and Case are alone, he could have jacked into her and perhaps spied on what she was dreaming, which would have been really interesting if very abusive, but he doesn’t do this. Gibson isn’t exactly clear on how this technology operates, but it seems that Case is actually jacked into her mind rather than just her visual implants, because he can feel her pain and feel her body as well as see what she sees. I'd forgotten the details of this until I read the last part of the novel.

But commendably, instead of spying on Molly, Case hooks in to the Flatline which they have just stolen, something in which he doubtlessly has far more interest, and therein begins another relationship. The box is somewhat more than a simple response system based on the Dixie Flatline’s neural image, and it asks to be destroyed when the job is done because it doesn’t want to continue with that kind of existence. At the end of the novel, the Flatline disappears from the box, but it's implied that a copy of the image has become a part of the Neuromancer/Wintermute combined AI.

I'm not sure what the need for the Flatline is because it really doesn't contribute much except to exhibit to us a piece of fascinating technology. When they mount the assault on Wintermute's mainframe, it's a piece of Chinese hacking software that does the job. The Flatline essentially does nothing.

Their next step is to recruit a psychotic illusionist called Riviera, who can project images of all kinds which he uses to hide himself and offer distractions, particularly during his capture. With him in hand, the team heads out to the Tessier-Ashpool space station, where Armitage finally loses it and gets blown out of an airlock.

Why the T-A family choose (or even how they could afford) to build what's rather erroneously titled 'Freeside' is a mystery. Something like that would have cost countless billions of dollars. It's a huge Zeppelin-shaped space station orbiting at the L5

Huge is no exaggeration. It's literally a city in space, featuring hotels, parks, stores, gambling casinos, and the Tessier-Ashpool residence. It rotates about its long axis to provide a form of gravity. It recycles its water and air, but everything else has to be trucked up from Earth, a system which would itself cost several fortunes each year. There's no information as to how it's protected from meteors (or even high-speed space dust) in its orbit.

Rivera inveigles himself into the T-A family's good graces by performing a show at one of the venues on Freeside. The show pisses off Molly because she (or rather her psychically created form) is the star of it, interacting with Riviera. This gets him his invitation into the T-A compound, but exactly what this gains the team is not clear. Riviera contributes nothing to Wintermute's plan. Again it seems we're treated to Riviera in the same way we're treated ot the Flatline - to get an idea of some interesting technology, but for no other purpose.

Molly breaks into the compound anyway, and so does Case, both by means of hacking and then phsycially with one of the Rastas called Maelcum (an intriguing name! lol!) to rescue Molly. Riviera has defected to the T-A side, but is poisoned by the resident T-A family member because he's just a nasty piece of work and so, when pushed, is she!

Molly fails badly. She's overpowered by Riviera and the resident T-A ninja (called Hideo, and about whom a story would be interesting). Her leg is broken again and Riviera gratuitously breaks one of her lenses just to see if it's possible. This may be what triggers 3Jane, the only functional T-A family member who is at home, to poison him since she finds herself strongly attracted to Molly.

I was disappointed that we never get to see Molly strut her stuff. No fights are described in Neuromancer! I sincerely hope that this novel is made into a movie and some kick-A Asian martial artist gets her role. I can't believe it hasn't been filmed already, but from what I've read, it's not through want of trying.

Anyway, the T-A family is hugely dysfunctional. Molly encounters one of the aging men, who is in process of committing suicide after having strangled his wife. Molly helps him along with a flechette dart to the eye. The T-A's spend a lot of time in cryogenic storage and spend a lot of money on physical assaults on the aging process. No mention of telomeres here, but a lot of talk about organ transplants and cosmetic surgery.

The T-A residence is pretty much deserted, the only resident who is not in cryogenic storage and is also in the compound being 3Jane, who is the third clone of the original Jane. She seems to be the only one who is close to being normal! After having engineered the overpowering Molly and the capturing Case and Maelcum, she actually wants them to open the box which is the object of their mission. Open the box, key in the password, and free Wintermute from its mainframe prison.

The ending of Neuromancer is rather rushed, like Gibson was forced to hurry it out too quickly to meet his deadline. This is another advantage of self-publishing! No deadlines!

Molly abandons Case, leaving him with nothing more than a note informing him that it's been real, but hanging with him is taking off the edge off her skills. He never sees her again.

Wintermute and Neuromancer merge with some vague plan of trying to contact an apparent AI which has been signalling Earth from space. Case replaces the drug-immune organs with which Wintermute had equipped him as part of his resurrection; now he can enjoy drugs again. Whoop-te-do! He essentially blows all the money he was paid on that operation, and on a new computer system (called a 'deck' here). He gets a girlfriend called Michael, and he goes back to his old life of hacking.

Kinda disppointing overall. But that takes nothing away from the cool concepts and interesting visions which Gibson gave us in this story. It's a bit sad that he hasn't really done anything of great note since then, except to putz around in this same environment for the last thirty years. I've read nothing of his since Neuromancer that has made anywhere near the same impression on me.

Neuromancer was Kick-A, and outstanding when it was first published. It was a sensation among those in the know, but it never generated any great buzz otuside of that circle. Reading it these days when so many others have riffed off the world he created means that it doesn't come off as being anything special any more, and that's sad given how ground-breaking and influential it was when it was first released. But that's the nature of the beast isn't it? There, but for the grace of Gibson, go I!

You can always go read the wikipedia article and then read some more about it at at other venues online to get a better idea of what kind of a novel this truly was.