Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy)

by William Gibson

Ebook, 1987

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Publication

Ace (1987), Edition: Reprint, 256 pages

Description

Fiction. Science Fiction. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:A stylish, street smart, frighteningly probable parable of the future from the visionary, New York Times bestselling author of Neuromancer and Agency. A corporate mercenary wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him, for a mission more dangerous than the one he�??s recovering from: to get a defecting chief of R&D�??and the biochip he�??s perfected�??out intact. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties�??some of whom aren�??t

User reviews

LibraryThing member elenchus

Count Zero is the beginning of Gibson's signature approach, used solidly through the next 2 trilogies: set up three largely independent stories, then interleave chapters from each until events and characters converge. It's as though he's blended three novellas linked by a common denouement but very

little else prior to that point.

Gibson's plotting is more complex and if anything more elliptical than Neuromancer. My sense now is that the boxmaker is Wintermute (an AI in Neuromancer) cut down to root mechanical and fragmented memories, boosted by the chance download / merger with black market software (key among these experimental biosoft). But these ideas are doled out in pieces and glancingly enough that it's not definitive. It seems as though Gibson honed his style even over the course of this novel, the chapters getting closer and more uniformly spare and detached at the end as compared to the beginning. Part of that may simply be it's more difficult to set something up in short paragraphs.

Gibson's Sprawl trilogy could be seen as the story of characters like Finn or even Wintermute, but told from the viewpoint of others with key roles at different times. A precursor to Bigend? Have to see what Mona Lisa Overdrive contributes to that interpretation.

Is Gibson familiar with James Branch Cabell? I detect a similar re-telling of a seminal, archetypal tale in radically different settings and with largely unrelated characters. Theme and subtheme, trial and retrial, focus and resonance. And both display a sense of humour in how they bring back or revise minor characters across novels.

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synopsis | Bobby Newmark's first foray against corporate ICE uses stolen microsoft, and he's swept into an ever-expanding ring of criminals attempting to understand why he wasn't killed. Marly is hired by reclusive art dealer, Josef Virek, to identify the maker of artifacts ('boxes') trickling into the art market without provenance or signature. It becomes clear Virek expects to learn something more relevant to his dependence upon life support than to his art business. Turner is hired to facilitate the illegal transfer of top Maas Biolabs hybridoma researcher Christopher Mitchell to Hosaka. The job is sabotaged and Turner's left wondering why Mitchell wanted to leave Maas, and how to avoid Maas and Hosaka operatives cleaning up after the botched job.

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LibraryThing member mustreaditall

I feel like I've read the Sprawl series as a set of flashbacks. I started with the most recent, Mona Lisa Overdrive, slammed all the way back to Nueromancer, and then wound up filling in the final blanks in the middle. I don't know if it's because I have all the pieces now or just the way this one

was put together, but Count Zero is my favorite of the three. (The only big flaw being the complete lack of Molly).

But what's not to like? Corporate rule may be my "favorite" form of dystopia in fiction - it's just so god damned possible these days - and Gibson loves it as much as I do. There's less out and out techbabble and more story (necessary, I guess, when you have at least three plot lines tangling up together and no dearth of worthwhile characters to follow) - although, as usual with the godfather of cyberpunk, most of the techy stuff is right on the nose some 20+ years later.

From what I understand, the reason Gibson let his image of the internet wander so far is that he really didn't have much of a clue about computers when he started writing these things. He heard a few things about it, came up with ideas that sounded cool to him, and went with it. That's how he wound up presenting us with steampunk computers and fractured AI personalities mimicking Vodun spirits and the web itself as a sort of shared hallucination of infinite space and possibility. He didn't know what was considered impossible, so he went ahead and invented it anyway.

Having finished all three of his Sprawl novels, I'd like to see a book of short stories by different authors set in that vast urban landscape. Jack Womack, China Miéville, maybe even someone like Haruki Murakami. Just an idea.

final thought: Putting aside his agile story-telling, his amazing tech predictions, and his ability at world-building, you know what I really do appreciate about Gibson? He offers a sort of hope for his characters at the end, and us through them. Not everyone makes it, but those who do are often better off, thanks to dumb luck and their own effort, at the end than they are at the beginning. And after 8 months of nearly unmitigated dark resolutions, that's something worth having.

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LibraryThing member edgeworth

Given that Neuromancer is one of my favourite books - one of many people's favourite books, in fact, and one of the best books of the last thirty years - I'm surprised it's taken me so long to read the rest of Gibson's Sprawl series. Perhaps it's because I suspected that he would never be able to

live up to the outrageous standard of excellence set by Neuromancer. I was correct in that suspicion, although that certainly doesn't mean that Count Zero is a bad book.

Neuromancer followed a single character as he was recruited by a shadowy figure assembling a team for the ultimate heist; Count Zero follows the familiar literary trope of separate, seemingly unrelated stories that merge together at the climax. Turner, a freelance mercenary, is sent to Arizona to aid in the defection of a senior scientist from one powerful corporation to another; Marly, a French gallery owner, is hired by the a man of great wealth to track down the creator of a series of art pieces; and Bobby, an amateur cowboy who styles himself Count Zero, is rescued by a mysterious woman while in the death-vice of cyberspace counter-intrusive measures. Once again present from both Neuromancer and Gibson's much more recent novel Pattern Recognition is the theme of ordinary losers coming into the orbit of extremely powerful and influential people.

The world of Count Zero seems less fully realised, futuristic, and bleakly depressing than Neuromancer's. The settings in Europe, especially, seem barely dystopian at all; I don't recall Neuromancer's brief Paris chapters much, but here I really noticed the discrepancy between Paris and the Sprawl. The Sprawl is very deliberately painted as bleak, ugly and Ballardian, wracked with crime and poverty; Paris still seems to retain that Old World charm, as though Gibson couldn't help but think of Europe as a place of beauty and dignity granted by age. Do Americans feel that same New World insecurity that Australians do - that lack of heritage, of venerable architecture?

For some reason I also noticed his failure to perfectly predict the future a lot more - Japan is a major world player but China gets barely a mention, there are no cell phones, the United States no longer exists but the Soviet Union still does... that's an unfair standard to judge any science fiction writer on, of course, but the fact that I barely noticed these faulty predictions in Neuromancer, while I did in Count Zero, says something about how engrossing the respective stories are.

Count Zero does not precisely fail to live up to the world created by Neuromancer, but it does lack the same punch; not only does it feel like a mere variation on a theme, but it lacks the urgency, excitement, and sense of epic importance that Neuromancer had. The characters are less likeable and memorable, the three-way plot effectively makes for regular interruptions to the stories, and the climax seemed quite rushed. According to Wikipedia it was apparently a serial before being published as a novel, which might help explain some of its flaws. As I said earlier, it's not a bad book, and I still intend to finish reading the trilogy, but it doesn't even begin to compare to Neuromancer.

A side-note: Count Zero fatures two Australian characters, both of whom, with weary predictablity, spout out "mate" and "bloody" and "bugger" a lot. (Oh, fine, only one of them does, but that's one too many). The only other nation I can think of whose citizens must go about with such exhausting stereotypical albatrosses around their necks is Mongolia.

Another side-note: Surely there is no author who suffers a wider difference between the quality of his writing and the quality of his covers than William Gibson?

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LibraryThing member isabelx

A top research scientist's desire to defect from one corporation to another links three characters whose stories at first seem totally separate. Firstly there is Turner, the security specialist in charge of extracting the defecting scientist from his previous employer's grasp. Then there is Marly,

a disgraced art dealer hired by a billionaire to track down the unknown artist who created some mysterious wooden boxes. Finally there is Bobby Newmark (aka Count Zero), who gets into a world of trouble on his first time out as a console jockey, when he is asked to use some new icebreaker software to access a particular data source in the matrix.

Having finished it, I'm still not at all sure exactly what was going on with the box-maker, the voodoo loa and the girl, but it was all very exciting. I spotted Finn's reference to the events of "Neuromancer" at the end of chapter 16, but I could probably do with re-reading it since I can't remember what the characters in the earlier book found or how it is relevant to events in "Count Zero" (if at all).

I like cyberpunk a lot (it could well be my favourite sub-genre of SF) and I've a few others on my TBR shelf that I need to read over the next few months.

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LibraryThing member AQsReviews

I read Neuromancer in 2012 and it has taken me ten years to get the motivation to read Count Zero. Sure, in the years I have picked the book up and read a page or two and every time I just did not feel like this was the novel I wanted to read. Well, I had enough of this behavior and I brought it

with me to the middle of Appalachia. There is nothing much around besides kudzu and deer. I read Count Zero in about a day and a half. Count Zero is a bit of a sequel to the previous novel – one would definitely want to read Neuromancer first. However, it is not much of a direct continuation of the storyline; it is more of a continuation of the environment and setting. I liked Count Zero more because the novel just seemed a bit easier to follow.

Gibson novels are very compressed. As I read Gibson, I realize I have to read each and every word absolutely. There is no speed-reading these novels and there is no skipping. No skimming and no skipping – absolutely none, not one word. Not ever.

Reading Gibson novels is a bit tiring because he does have his own architecture and lingo that he does not explain to the reader and the context is not a huge assist, either. Having to read every single word carefully is also tedious because it makes this 246 page novel seem much longer.

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LibraryThing member RussellCross

I really enjoyed Neuromancer but I'm afraid I abandoned this about a quarter of the way through. Turgid and dull and felt like word salad at times. I'm obviously out of step with the majority who see this as great literature but for me the emperor has no clothes and it's just not worth the effort.

I'm now in my sixties and with less and less time to read books I have to decide what not to read - and this is one.

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LibraryThing member DRFP

After his excellent early short stories (one of them, New Rose Hotel, seems like the prototype for one of the plot strands in this book) and the brilliant Neuromancer, Gibson serves up a disappointment.

The first problem with this novel is how long it takes to get going. The three plot lines are so

disparate and equally slow to get going that it makes the first half of the book something of a bore. It's not terrible or anything but I did keep wondering, "When will this get going?" And why was I supposed to care, for most of the book, about Virek's hunt for the box maker? Sometimes there was very little to go on.

This feeling is made worse by the fact that Gibson develops his characters so little. Neuromancer wasn't overflowing with character development but it moved at pace and the cast were at least cool or edgy. Here they're all rather bland and what was there to really like about the titular Count Zero?

On the plus side, I enjoyed seeing the consequences of Neuromancer play out here and Gibson keeps the amount of time spent in the matrix to a minimum (a positive because sometimes he doesn't express himself clearly enough when describing time spent jacked in).

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LibraryThing member lanes_3

Poor audible performance. Too long of a pause between each sentence. Tough to finish

LibraryThing member AdonisGuilfoyle

The cover of my edition quotes a newspaper review as saying that Gibson is 'the Raymond Chandler of SF', and I would have to concur - both authors weave impossibly involved plots, but the stories are told so well that it hardly matters! The real joy of reading Gibson is the journey, and the

wonderful way he uses language and imagination to craft a universe that is a unique blend of now (or the 1980s, at least) and the technology of the future. The characters in this sequel lack the personality and focus of the first book, but it's just as easy and entertaining to be drawn into their world.

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LibraryThing member Arctic-Stranger

It is hard to remember when this was new and fresh. Now even my grandmother is jacked in, albeit not with her frontal lobes. Gibson does manage to capture the early days of the cyber movement really well, and tells a good story to boot. A younger person may read it and gawk at the simplistic

technology, but could be drawn into the novel because of the plot.

Gibson is short on character development though. That, to me is is his one flaw. I find his characters mildy interesting, but I would not want to take any of them home with me.

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LibraryThing member StennKlubov

This book had me at "slamhound". (first paragraph)

LibraryThing member myfanwy

Gibson is first and foremost a master of atmosphere. He has a way of forming a complete world, complete with slang and politics, religions, technology, details down to the specific clothing styles that distinguish class structure. It is incredibly visual and generally disturbing. (I will have

forever in my mind the image of a genetically engineered centipede used for suturing in black market surgery.) Count Zero is no different than his other books in this attention to detail. Like his other books this book feels like a direct precursor to the Matrix. People jack into the matrix through a plug in the back of their heads, they walk around in long black trench coats sweeping through a decrepit city, and an ordinary but gifted programmer is declared as "the One" by a black man with knowledge of the powers behind the matrix. Sound a little familiar? Interestingly enough, it is only familiar in the most basic aspects of the atmosphere. The rest of the plot is entirely different but nonetheless races along with hollywood action: explosions, chase scenes, narrow escapes.

I like Gibson. I like Gibson enough to give him the benefit of the doubt even though he expends too much on creating atmosphere and too little on a plot. For the first sixty pages I really had no idea what was going on. Who was connected to whom, and why? Who were dozens of characters walking across the page and would they prove to be important or would they die in the next chapter? Although the plotlines did eventually intersect, the plot itself was still the least well-tailored aspect of the book. Like Stephenson, he can't seem to end this book. All the characters eventually arrived at the same location but the final scene all boiled down to an unexplained confluence of events, leaving the reader a bit dizzy and unsatisfied.

I now realize that it's incredibly rare to find an author who can do atmosphere, and characterization, and plot all in one book. I'll give an author with promise another chance (just as I'm still waiting for M. Night Shyamalan's masterwork), but it may well be that Gibson hit his peak with Neuromancer. One great book is still far more than most people get!

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LibraryThing member alexthekone

Much slower than Neuromancer yet lnterestingly tied to it. It does read like the logical sequel to Neuromancer but is still limited by many important characters with too little depth.

I must also say I was lost by the Voodoo references which pretty much obscured my understanding of the ending.

We'll see how Mona Lisa Overdrive turns out.

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LibraryThing member jshrop

Gibson's sequel to the great "Neuromancer" was not a total let down, but failed to produce the same feeling of immersion and quick action of it's predecessor. I think one of the biggest problems with Count Zero was the disjointed storytelling, moving between 3 seperate characters and plots. While

this was a great idea in concept, and made for a neat way to tie things together in the end, the length of each segment varied so widely that sometimes you were enveloped too long in one story so that you either became so commited to finding out the continuation of that line, or completely forgot what was going on with another line, that it made for almost agrivating reading. The first half of Count Zero is laborous and somewhat slow paced. Not until after the mid point do we get enough movement through the story line to really get excited about it. I'm sorry, but in this novel, Gibson does not have his best showing, and doesn't mirror the sheer brilliance of Neuromancer.

Another problem I had with Count Zero was Gibson's use of overly descriptive language, describing all sorts of mundane and useless details to the n-th degree. It bogs down the story, contributing to the story's lack of movement in the first half, and generally adds a waste of words to an otherwise cool premise and plot. At the end, I felt like the whole story could have been better executed in the span of a novella or long short story with more precision, and less unneccesary words.

I thouroughly enjoy William Gibson's work in general. Neuromancer is a must read for any sci-fi/cyberpunk fan, and likewise his latest offerings, Spook Country, Pattern Recognition, don't dissapoint. I would still recommend this read if you are a big Gibson fan like myself, but if you haven't read his newer works, go give them a try first, I think you will be more impressed and have a better experience.

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LibraryThing member dczapka

You can't fault Count Zero for trying, and try it does, very hard in fact. It wants so much to be like its predecessor, Neuromancer, yet its cyber-based sensibility is about the only thing that translates to Gibson's second, and far weaker, novel.

The sense of adventure and excitement is lost here

as Gibson attempts to manage three disparate plot threads that ultimately resolve in a messy and somewhat heavy-handed manner, tying all the loose ends up in the vestiges of the big bad multinational corporation that replaced the big bad multinational corporation that fell at the end of Neuromancer.

The problem is that none of the plot threads are particularly exciting or fast-paced: the art plot seems completely disjointed with the other two, and the moments in cyberspace lack the detail, precision, or inventiveness of our original ventures. Combine that with clunky language that can't decide if it wants to be ultra-hip or postmodern pastoral, and a cast of characters that are as flat and static as they are uninteresting, and you have a novel that is far too complex for its own good and far too poorly managed to resolve itself in any meaningful way.

Pardon the slip into clichéd clinchers, but most of this novel feels like a slow, painful countdown to zero -- zero pages left. But only if you're willing to stick with it to the end, which you may find may be not be worth your time.

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LibraryThing member mckall08

You might call this a strand off of Neuromancer which set the enviroment. It's not a sequel really in that is follows Neuromancer's characters, easier to follow with less sci-fi whiz-bang.

LibraryThing member heidilove

possibly my favourite gibson. this is more the old gibson, before he got really full of himself. it's nice for that reason alone, but the story brings its own compelling aspects as well.

LibraryThing member ttavenner

This is another solid work by William Gibson. It has the spacey future-tech feel of Neuromancer, but also the love of vast conspiracy you find in his more recent novels. He always manages to take story in a direction you would not have expected, but one that is intellectually thrilling.

LibraryThing member Vvolodymyr

I liked Count Zero even more than Neuromancer. The complexity of the plot is very satisfying.
The only thing that some might find a hinderance, is that (I am convinced) the book must be read quickly, with the same ferocity as the author wrote/designed it to be, as if mentally gasping for air between

sentences, which I like about Gibson's cyberpunk books - Very Invigorating!

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LibraryThing member jddunn

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.

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LibraryThing member szarka

It's the characters that made Count Zero a compelling read for me. The "science fiction" aspects of the story are incidental. [2006-01-08]

LibraryThing member gilag

Not as good as Nueromancer. There are parts where it really picks up and gets interesting but the ending left me flat. Almost a little unorganized.

LibraryThing member wenestvedt

It's tempting to say something like "seminal" about this book, but it's really just a fun read without all the mental heavy lifting that makes a Neal Stephenson book stand out (and be so rewarding).

LibraryThing member Kurt.Rocourt

Not as good as Neuromancer. Found it boring actually.

LibraryThing member TadAD

You probably want to read Neuromancer before this. I didn't enjoy it as much as its predecessor though but, typically Gibson, it's very readable.

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