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| Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget. |
Wits might interject wittily that this is something of an area of expertise, what! (I’ve also been reacquainting myself with Wodehouse, sorry).
Well, hmm, yes, and in this context, that is the context of book two of the Sprawl trilogy, it did take me a few moments to pick up the rhythm and jazz of it all. The language flits and swings, can be flat and toneless but jumps towards a cymbal-crash and rattle on the rim with little warning. There’s cyberspace voodoo. There’s corporate militia. There’s child abuse, frankly. And notwithstanding that last one, it’s also deadpan hilarious in places.
But what of the plot?
Yes, what indeed. There are three threads on which Gibson pulls and which unravel a complex tapestry to reveal what amounts to one or more rogue AIs running around the ‘matrix’ disguised as Haitian Gods. Bobby Newmark, hacker and titular Count Zero (look it up yourself, I'm not going to tell you what count zero means), tests black market, cutting-edge software in the matrix – a cyberspace created by the linking of super-computers, the respository of all information on earth, and in which three-dimensional avatars interact and, of course, compete for resources – only for it to nearly kill him. He’s rescued somehow by the appearance of a girl who extracts him before his death. A corporate merc, Turner, is hired to help the defection of a top-level research exec from one mega-corporation to another, a move fraught with peril and one destined to fail. Instead of the exec, Turner finds he’s rescued the daughter, who it turns out is the Angela that Bobby saw in the matrix and who has been experimented upon by her father to be able to plug into the matrix without hardware. Cue cross-country fleeing and mayhem, knight-errant-style. And disgraced gallery-owner Marly is tricked into finding works of art for mega-billionaire Virek in his hope that one or more of them might hold the key to the biosoft that Maas corporation so jealously guarded from competitors, even to the point of murdering the scientist-executive who attempted to defect, and who wants it to help him become immortal.
Tale as old a time!
Honestly, in the remembering and retelling, I am frankly amazed at how much a) I can remember and b) that any of it made sense at the time. Did I say Turner slept with his brother’s wife and got her pregnant while he was on the run with Angela? Well, he did! But that speaks to Gibson’s talent not only for making a highly specialised vernacular modality, if I’m using that term correctly, seem organic and baked-into the setting, but also to make any of this madness seem like a natural course of events.
It’s staggering.
It’s also chillingly prescient.
I immediately wanted to read book three of the Sprawl trilogy (but you’ll have to wait a little while for my review) and I am actively excited to read book three of the Jackpot trilogy, assuming he makes it to publication given this was published in the eighties! It’s a gift to me that a man whose work I spurned foolishly in my youth is still pushing out such high-quality imaginative work and I haven’t yet read it all!
Yes, what indeed. There are three threads on which Gibson pulls and which unravel a complex tapestry to reveal what amounts to one or more rogue AIs running around the ‘matrix’ disguised as Haitian Gods. Bobby Newmark, hacker and titular Count Zero (look it up yourself, I'm not going to tell you what count zero means), tests black market, cutting-edge software in the matrix – a cyberspace created by the linking of super-computers, the respository of all information on earth, and in which three-dimensional avatars interact and, of course, compete for resources – only for it to nearly kill him. He’s rescued somehow by the appearance of a girl who extracts him before his death. A corporate merc, Turner, is hired to help the defection of a top-level research exec from one mega-corporation to another, a move fraught with peril and one destined to fail. Instead of the exec, Turner finds he’s rescued the daughter, who it turns out is the Angela that Bobby saw in the matrix and who has been experimented upon by her father to be able to plug into the matrix without hardware. Cue cross-country fleeing and mayhem, knight-errant-style. And disgraced gallery-owner Marly is tricked into finding works of art for mega-billionaire Virek in his hope that one or more of them might hold the key to the biosoft that Maas corporation so jealously guarded from competitors, even to the point of murdering the scientist-executive who attempted to defect, and who wants it to help him become immortal.
Tale as old a time!
Honestly, in the remembering and retelling, I am frankly amazed at how much a) I can remember and b) that any of it made sense at the time. Did I say Turner slept with his brother’s wife and got her pregnant while he was on the run with Angela? Well, he did! But that speaks to Gibson’s talent not only for making a highly specialised vernacular modality, if I’m using that term correctly, seem organic and baked-into the setting, but also to make any of this madness seem like a natural course of events.
It’s staggering.
It’s also chillingly prescient.
I immediately wanted to read book three of the Sprawl trilogy (but you’ll have to wait a little while for my review) and I am actively excited to read book three of the Jackpot trilogy, assuming he makes it to publication given this was published in the eighties! It’s a gift to me that a man whose work I spurned foolishly in my youth is still pushing out such high-quality imaginative work and I haven’t yet read it all!
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