I really did not keep in mind the finishing nevertheless. Did words follow the very same neural paths this time around as last? Were the memories of the tale staying like loas in a lot more well lit areas of my mind? Scenes along with configurations obtained rebuilded like the little boxes that sent Josef Virek looking for the artist.
Sometimes my very own publications show up to have variants of those boxes, making me the multi- armed manufacturer choosing points for consolidation and also after that sending them down the gravity well readily available to the real individuals. So perhaps it is pythonic however? Last edited by ImportBot. November 2, History. An edition of Count Zero Not in Library. Libraries near you: WorldCat. Count Zero , Ace Books.
Borrow Listen. Download for print-disabled. Conde Cero September , Minotauro. Conde Cero October , Minotauro. Count Zero November 27, , Voyager. But the supporting characters really make me mourn for the far more interesting book that could have been.
Why not let Angie and the Voodoo hackers be the center of the story? THAT would be a book I'd read the crap out of. William Gibson can write. He has a way with language that not every writer, even really good ones, ever manages to master. He knows how to use and manipulate words and phrases to create cultures.
With this talent, he creates novels that conjure up pocket universes of our future. Count Zero is much William Gibson can write.
Count Zero is much more spiritual and emotionally evocative than its predecessor, Neuromancer. There are three main characters and three intertwined plots. And Marly is a curator hunting up the provenance of an intrigue art object at the behest of a reclusive collector. At the risk of sounding reductionist, the three plotlines conveniently symbolize three of the primary themes in Count Zero : a weary mercenary confronting the emptiness of his chosen profession; a new, untested youth struggling with his coming-of-age; and a young woman pulled inexorably deeper into the grey and black areas of the art world, pulled by a man who is not entirely human anymore.
So there is no denying that Count Zero is a complex book, when one really stops to consider everything that happens in it. The language that Gibson uses can often conceal this fact, because sometimes it is difficult to follow the train of the story or at least, I found this to be the case.
There is a lyrical, almost dream-like quality to his prose; I encountered this in some of his other novels, but it seems particularly noticeable in this one. Sometimes this vagueness is advantageous. This lends a timeless quality to the setting though his use of the term tapes stands out as an exception. Yet they crop up at the most interesting moments. In Neuromancer Gibson raised questions regarding how an AI that is essentially an alien being would co-exist with humanity.
On the other side of the divide, we have humans like Turner or Angela or even Bobby, people who have jacks that allow them to download data directly into their brain. Katherine Hayles has had such an effect on me, since I only ever read a single article by her so far—but I keep seeing the motif of embodiment show up all the time in my posthuman fiction. Turner might be a cyborg, and his body might recently have undergone dramatic reconstructive surgery.
But he still has a body. And so, unlike the shady Josef Virek, who is more of a construct than a human being any more, Turner is still human—or at least, seems to perform as human in a way that satisfies the rest of us.
Gibson is good at asking these questions without beating them over our heads. There is a refreshing lack of pretentiousness to books like Count Zero , even as they force us to think about difficult ideas. He has been developing revolutionary biochip technology for Maas, but now apparently he wants to defect to Hosaka.
This little game of industrial brinksmanship has its precedent in present-day industry, of course, but I suspect that few companies go to the lengths that Hosaka does, hiring mercenaries and a medical team to extract any destructive implants Maas might have installed to dissuade Mitchell from walking.
In this future, the companies might not own you outright, but they almost certainly own you in any way that matters. Although not my favourite aspect of Count Zero , its spiritual component deserves consideration as well. Science and secularism seems to go hand-in-hand these days. Yet this partnership has not, historically, always been the case. Science and spirituality have a much longer history, and many science fiction authors acknowledge this fact.
In this book, some of the minor characters are involved in a techno-voodoo worship of loa that inhabit cyberspace. What will happen as we allow programs to go feral, to roam, and to mix code in unpredictable ways? Quality triumphs over quantity, and while Gibson has not been as prolific as some of his contemporaries, his novels are always worth reading.
He has a grasp on the ways in which technology challenges and changes our society, the ways we react to these changes and initiate our own. Such attentiveness! Such style!
Although it did not quite manage to capture and hold my attention like Pattern Recognition did, I still enjoyed it thoroughly. This is the second volume of Sprawl trilogy. It was nominated for Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards. It is not a direct sequel, more a book set in the same world. The story starts with blowing up of a mercenary, Turner.
He is literally put together in a clinic and decides to drop from radars but is found for the next job. The third plotline concern Marly Krushkhova, a former gallerist, who is hired by superrich Josef Virek to find out a person, who made some strange art. With a poetic vigor the author mixes absolutely alien concepts, like cyberspace and voodoo to produce a unique amalgamation.
I guess this book wins from re-reading but to pile through it for the first time is a challenge. 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 pil 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. 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. Jul 28, Erik rated it liked it Shelves: detailed-review , scififantasy. With each review I write, I become increasingly daunted by a sense of infinite possibility. I have an entire book, this Count Zero, to write about — what in the world should I focus on?
The question in turn gives rise to an equally haunting sense of relativism. Is this book good? Is this book bad? With few exceptions, a good book is not infallibly so nor a bad book insurmountably so. Rather, the goodness or badness is a choice I, the reader, must make. Yet when I make that choice — to With each review I write, I become increasingly daunted by a sense of infinite possibility. Yet when I make that choice — to be positive or to be negative — and then write my review, my chosen perspective will percolate backwards in time and memory and retroactively alter the focus of my thoughts on the book.
To quote Bruce Lee: when you pour water into a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Become the bottle or the cup? My mental library only increases. I only add books and never take away. Only the hordes of death and disease threaten my library! And I thus far remain stalwart against these inevitable foemen. To the youthful, newness and goodness correlate.
Unsurprisingly, the once bright realm of words is less golden and more gilded. Somehow I expected more than tired eyes. Less a diamond sculpture and more like a statue of ice. Melting, dulling — and so easy to kick over. Books and the stories within them no longer seem like great FORCES of nature, which transport me — often without my noticing it — into fantastical realms, feeding my subconscious direct like some sort of IV drip filled with idea, scenery, and character.
The author is not a tornado but a cab driver. Certainly I am transported from realm to realm, but I do so aware of the transportation. Books now represent individual works by individual persons. Flawed and imperfect. It no longer surprises me, for example, to learn that a wife can continue to love her abusive husband for years and years.
I am no longer filled with a hot rage over such things, but sorrowful compassion. Maybe it does. I am not so sure. I happen to now think that these flawed loves persist not because they are instinctual and pathetic but because the lover made the CHOICE to love and therefore became defined by it.
Thus defined, they could no longer give up the love without their identity becoming destroyed. Such thoughts give rise to more doubts and more questions. Is it better to control your love or be controlled by it? Or is there any difference between the two? Somehow I have managed to write many paragraphs in a book review without saying a word about the book. You may even wonder what any of this has to do with it. I hope not but allow me to be more direct: I likewise struggle with the decision to consider my reading of Count Zero a win or a lose.
It contains elements I love: noir! And AI. Man, I love AI. I love how AI will free humanity of such a burden on our shoulders. So, yeah, I dream of the friend who will sit with me and argue about the future of robots. Barring the real existence of such a friend, however, this and other books will suffice. And the style, sharp and purposefully obscure, with the near death of major characters happening off the screen and told in retrospect, and jargon and terminology thrown around like ninja stars: difficult but interesting.
His ultimate fate seemed perfunctory, abrupt, and anti-climactic. Indeed, the threads which bound the three PoVs together never tightened in unity in the same compelling way that, say, the threads in Game of Thrones do. Rather, their connection was accidental at best.
My enjoyment of the book felt accidental, like I just so happened to be in the right mood, with the right amount of time, to engage with it.
The plot and everything that happens feels like one big accident. And yet I cannot argue that this makes the book less good. Less compelling, yes. But I am rather leery of the notion that compelling can or should be equated with good.
So then we return, do I become the bottle or the cup? Do I say this book is good or it is bad? Do I recommend it? He wrote, Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. Even more, it feels insulting and dehumanizing. Here is a human: a complex spiral of DNA, one among many permutations it could have been, with memories and actions both good and bad, of high quality and low.
Who will judge this pitiful creature and call it angel or demon? Here, then, is Count Zero: a complex weave of words, one among many permutations it could have been, some good and some bad.
You can find either in it and which side of the coin you choose to focus on depends on you. A cop out, for sure, but then I do believe that was my point.
View all 8 comments. It is very well written, fast paced, filled with cool sci-fi action scenes and gadgetry, and not overly long in length. The problem with this book is that I really never cared one bit about any of the characters in this book, or in book one for that matter.
As a result, all the world building, science, and cool gadgetry is lost on me as my interest in it is never what it could be. And from that rather terminal perspective, I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh.
Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers.
I imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something like a tenth of my annual income. I was touched, Marly, at your affairs of the heart.
I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold. It almost seemed to Turner that it happened before the red line of light scythed down and touched him, pencil-thick beam swinging casually, as though someone were playing with a flashlight.
A blossom of red, beaten down by the rain, as the figure went to its knees and tumbled forward, a wire-stocked Savage sliding from beneath the poncho. Mar 28, Brad rated it liked it Shelves: sci-fi , lost-reviews. This review was written in the late nineties for my eyes only , and it was buried in amongst my things until recently when I uncovered the journal in which it was written.
I have transcribed it verbatim from all those years ago although square brackets may indicate some additional information for the sake of readability or some sort of commentary from now. This is one of my lost reviews. It captures the hyperreality of Count Zero.
I sure dig Turner, the extractor, in this tale. Distant, cold, re-built, Turner becomes the most traditionally romantic of Gibson's Sprawl characters.
What a bizarre review. It's mroe like a list. He's not pathetic. And he's got big, brass balls. Go Bobby. To cap it all off he gets the girl. Sure there were references, but its power was so huge that it could no longer engage as a character. Still, I dug this book. Fun, thought-provoking, riddled with despair. It's a future I see coming, and as depressing as it is I'd like to live to see it. I could be part of it. A world of action.
The old west everywhere. View 2 comments. May 07, Salman Mehedy Titas rated it liked it Shelves: science-fiction , artificial-intelligence , cyberpunk.
Count Zero is the sequel to Neuromancer in the sense that Neuromancer was the sequel to Burning Chrome. It takes place seven years after the events of Neuromancer. The book was written two years after the publication of its prequel. If you're thinking that Gibson decided to take pity on his readers, you're wrong. Count Zero makes Neuromancer seem like an easy book to read. Turner, a mercenary, who had been severely injured, had his body reconstructed.
He is allowed him a period of time to rest, b Count Zero is the sequel to Neuromancer in the sense that Neuromancer was the sequel to Burning Chrome. He is allowed him a period of time to rest, before a new employer summons him for an even deadlier mission. His mission is to smuggle a scientist, who wishes to change employment from Maas Biolabs to Hosaka two multinational companies.
Of course, nothing is ever simple. His recruitment was reluctant to begin with, he does not trust his teammates, and there is no guarantee if the scientist will successfully make it out. Bobby Newmark, an inhabitant of Barrytown and a wannabe cyber-cowboy, has just chewed onto more than he can swallow.
Using an unknown software that he was just given, he attacked a base, whose location was also given by the same person. In his desperate attempts to make something out of his life - because nothing happens around here - he steps into a trap that might as well kill him. Bobby is saved by miraculous and unknown methods, by an entity unknown to him.
But he has also been marked for death, and it seems it will follow him whatever he goes. Marly Krushkhova was an owner of an art gallery, until she was tricked into selling a forgery, and had been dishonoured since then - thanks to the media. The actual culprit was her then-boyfriend, Alain, who preyed upon her feelings to open an easy pathway. Her life has been going downhills since then. That is, until ultra-rich art patron - Josep Virek - hires her to locate the artist of a certain piece of art - A unique box.
However, Virek is less than human, and eventually Marly realizes that he is one man who should not be served. But one does easily cross one such as Virek and get away. Especially when he had the game under his control the whole time. Seven years have washed away after the events of Neuromancer.
One would hope that more light would be shed onto what happened, but we have no such luck. The Scar by China Mieville 5 4. Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver 4. Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson 3. Thief by Megan Whalen Turner 0. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan 4.
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