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Avg. Rating: 4.5
Liked It - Didn't Love It - Not Sure Why
I really, really, really expected (and wanted) to love this book. When I first curled up with it, I was very anxious to dive right in. I love geeky techno-fi, sci-fi, and Gibson, as a general rule. But something just didn't work for me in Count_Zero.
I think it was not so much the story, which was satisfying, as much as the jerky cadance of Gibson's style in this book that was off-putting. I do not remember having to work so hard with the prose of Neuromancer. This was a significant issue for me, in that Count_Zero quickly became so fragmented and disjointed in its delivery that I struggled to remain in the flow. This, in turn, nearly ruined the otherwise enjoyable experience for me.
I would recommend Count_Zero - with a dash of trepidation. Sadly, I feel as if I missed something. I look at all these great reviews and I have to shrug my shoulders: it could very well just be me. Or maybe my expectations were out of whack. Or, I wasn't in the right mood. Or, Neal Stephenson has really spoiled me (similar to what happens to music in general after being exposed to Steely Dan). Or, most likely, I should have just read this immediately upon the heels of Neuromancer.
Hands down the Epitome of Cyberpunk
With this work and subsequent novels, Gibson has molded our thoughts of what the future would hold for the computer generations.
We watch as Gibson spills for more tales of the virtual world and the lives that it touches. A must read for all Martix fans, and nearly any one that uses a computer.
Not as good as Neuromancer
I loved Neuromancer and was happy to find that it was made into a sort of trilogy, but I was quite disappointed with Count Zero. I think it is a combination of the writing style, characters, and overall plot.As part of a trilogy, it does not have all that much in common with Neuromancer other than the world it is set in. None of the main characters from Neuromancer appear except for the Finn but it's only a cameo appearance here. We get the impression that the Wintermute AI sort of split into multiple entities at some time between the stories, which is suggested to be a few years. As for the characters, none of them really appealed to me the way the ones from Neuromancer did. The main protaganists are underdeveloped and rather bland at the end. They just weren't that sympathetic and I couldn't really get myself to care about them. Then there is the writing style. While Neuromancer was written entirely from Case's point of view, Count Zero is seen through the eyes of three different people who take different paths throughout the story. At the end of the book the paths converge but they do so in a rather sudden and Deus-Ex-Machina like way that is hard to swallow. It felt to me like Gibson was running out of pages and had realized that he needed to tie all these plot threads together. The book could have used a couple more chapters to straighten everything out, rather than having the non-ending it has like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (a small flaw in an otherwise phenomenal book.) This writing style however, has become common in Gibson's later novels, though fortunately in Virtual Light he learns to tie the three characters together better and in Idoru he sticks to only two main protagonists, which makes it easier to follow. Overall, I would only recommend reading Count Zero if you intend to read Mona Lisa Overdrive (final book in the trilogy) as it takes off shortly from the end of Count Zero with some of the same main characters and developes them more. In the big picture, Count Zero doesn't stand very well on it's own and mainly bridges the gap between the beginning and the end.
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