All posts tagged Mona Lisa Overdrive

Virtual Light by William Gibson (1993)

Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande. (Virtual Light, page 182)

The Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s prose

Gibson is a science fiction author but incorporates a good deal of noir, pulp, thriller and other genre tropes as well as, occasionally, rising to genuinely ‘literary’ complexity of psychological affect. I just read Michael Crichton’s debut novel, The Andromeda Strain, and that has a very straightforward plot, a thriller mapped out across five days, written in extremely clear and lucid prose, written so a 9-year-old could understand it. There are occasional demanding passages describing scientific theories around biology, extra-terrestrial life and so on, but these also are written with the clarity of a school textbook. Clarity is the aim.

Gibson by contrast, is noted for the cool, streetwise, technologically savvy and drug-wired prose style which he invented for his so-called Sprawl trilogy – being Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

All three of those novels concern ‘street’ people, hustlers, living among the shanties and hi-tech canyons of a futuristic society, living lives full of violence and drugs, and in all three these hustlers are slowly introduced to the higher levels of society, to the professional middle classes, then to billionaires, and so take us on a journey of discovery to uncover the real workings of their post-war society (the Sprawl trilogy is set 50 or 60 years in the future, after World War III).

Another feature of all three Sprawl novels is you’re never really sure what is going on – even when I reached the semi-apocalyptic endings of all three novels, I wasn’t completely sure what had just happened. Since I felt the same about his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which also rises to a kind of visionary apocalyptic climax, I concluded that this is a consistent element of Gibson’s approach: that key aspects of the narrative are kept mysterious, giving you the feeling of something ungraspable, just out of reach.

This is one way in which his books might be said to be ‘literary’, in a way the utterly obvious and unmysterious Crichton never is. Everything is explained in Crichton; big important things are not explained, in Gibson.

The Bridge trilogy

Virtual Light is the first of what developed into a new set of three novels, the Bridge Trilogy. How are the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies different? Well, the Sprawl stories were set about fifty years in the future, in around 2035 (they were written in the 1980s), after World War III, when everyone has access to advanced digital technology, and hackers make a living ‘jacking into’ cyberspace in order to carry out hit and run raids against the vast data icebergs of the future corporations which run everything.

The Bridge Trilogy is set in the future, but not so far into the future nor in so different a society. To be precise, it is set only ten years or so after the first novel was published – in what was then the ‘future’ of 2006.

There have still been society-changing events: a mega earthquake (which seems to be named Little Grande) has divided California into NoCal and SoCal (first mentioned page 8) resulting in a steady stream of new volcanoes up in Washington state (p.32). The President is a black woman (p.9), the air is toxic from all the polluting vehicles, skin cancer is a problem, everyone wears a lot of suntan cream (p.14) (see a full list of characteristics of the Bridge world, below).

Why is it called the Bridge trilogy? Because a central feature is that San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge broke during the earthquake, and has been transformed by homeless survivors into a huge, futuristic shantytown. For some of the old-timers who ‘colonised’ it, like Skinner, it’s a place to end their days, but for others like the fresh young heroine of the book, Chevette, it’s all they’ve ever known.

She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the [concrete] slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams. (p.122)

Given that the trilogy is named after the bridge, it’s notable that the bridge, as such, doesn’t feature that much in the plot, although it is woven in as a key setting, being the temporary home of Chevette and featuring the scene where a bounty hunter comes looking for her there.

The word ‘bridge’ possibly also has a metaphorical sense in that the entire trilogy is a ‘bridge’ from the present (well, the 1990s when Gibson wrote them) to the hyper-digital future envisioned in the Sprawl trilogy of the 2030s and ’40s.

All manner of cool references are slipped into the text about this cool future, which combines a maximum of stoner, drug, derelict street savvy with the highly-armed, gun expertise of Judge Dredd. Thus there is a lot of talk about Glock machine guns, knives, flick-knives, stunguns, SWAT stun grenades and many more weapons. This is meant to be a semi-dystopian future but a) the fact that it is set in what is now our past and b) its obsession with guns, just reinforces my sense of what a screwed-up, hyper-violent society America is, now.

The cool gun expertise alternates with cool references to a new designer drug, ‘dancer’.

Seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and therefore were both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic. (p.9)

From the get-go Gibson is master of a street savvy, whip-smart, post-Beat prose. Here’s a paragraph from the first page:

The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night. (page 1)

A lot is going on here, but to pick three obvious points:

It’s poetic prose, designed to be savoured and reread for its sound alone.
‘The sewage flats’? This is the one and only time they’re mentioned in the book so they take their place alongside hundreds of other details which are thrown away, unexplained, and from which the reader uses their imagination to construct the functioning and appearance of this futureworld (see the list below).
‘lodged in the lens of night’ is a self-consciously poetic and imaginative image. The book is full of them. It is a self-consciously stylish book, on all levels (in its prose style and setting and characters and plot).

Cops

However, having said all this about Gibson’s zippy prose style and slick future-vision, the reader quite quickly realises the novel is about a cop, Berry Rydell, who’s become a kind of private security guard. An American novel about a cop-turned private detective? Actually this is a very old trope, going back to the noir novels of the 1930s and 40s, to Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler…

And then, as the novel progresses, we watch as this tough private eye rescues the attractive young woman from the bad guys and whisks her off to safety while he tries to figure out the Right Thing To Do.

Hmmm, in this elementary respect, the basic plot structure of Virtual Light seems far from experimental or new – it is, to some extent, a cyberspace update of film noir tropes and characters and plot.

So: we learn that Berry Rydell, born 1983 (p.14) is an ex-cop from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was cashiered out of the service after shooting to pieces a drug-addled maniac who was holding his wife and kids hostage and demanding to speak to the president. He’s managed to get a job with a private security firm named IntenSecure in Los Angeles, alongside a ripe collection of freaks and allergy monkeys… Here’s a plot summary:

Plot summary

Berry Rydell is fired from the Tennessee police force for shooting a hostage-taker, the demented Kenneth Turvey.

Rydell is in his twenties looks like Tommy Lee Jones (p.81) i.e. ruggedly handsome.

The notoriety Rydell wins from shooting Turvey and being sacked leads to him briefly being taken up by the sexy presenter of a TV show, Cops With Problems, Karen Mendelson (p.16) who flies Rydell out to LA and up to her swank penthouse apartment for a few weeks of expense account living and wild sex, before a new and better story comes along, she dumps him and has him escorted from the apartment by security guards who work for IntenSecurity Corporation, a ‘rentacop’ outfit.

That’s what gives Rydell the idea of applying for a job there. He gets one driving a vast 6-wheel ‘Hotspur Hussar’ around the houses of the rich up in Benedict Canyon who’ve paid for security checks (to be precise, he is employed in ‘the residential armed-response branch’ of the IntenSecurity Corporation p.48), alongside a skinny streak of piss named Sublett, who grew up in a trailer park dominated by his born-again Christian mother, watching old movies and harangued all day by TV evangelists.

One evening Rydell and Sublett follow instructions beamed from ‘the Death Star’, the nickname they give to the Southern Californian Geosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite (p.11).

But it’s a hoax; someone has hacked into the system in order to make Rydell think a robbery and hostage situation is taking place at some luxury home. So Rydell rams the huge truck through the house’s security gate, across the Japanese garden and through the living room wall, and is staggering into the house with his machine gun when… an LAPD helicopter descends over the wreckage and arrests him; the children were off with their father somewhere; there was no hostage situation; the wife was having kinky sex (PVC and handcuffs) with the Polish gardener. As a result she sues IntenSecurity for physical and emotional damages, and they suspend Rydell from all duties: it’s another screw-up.

Cut to San Francisco. Here Chevette-Marie Washington (p.120), who long ago escaped from a juvenile detention centre outside Beaverton (p.125), is a bicycle courier. After making a drop (or ‘pull a tag’ as they seem to call it) at the Hotel Morrisey, she bumps into a drunk in the elevator who takes her up to a party hosted by someone called Cody Harwood, where she spends 15 minutes feeling seriously out of place, gets hit on a by a slimeball with a wet cigar then, on the way out, pushed up against the slimeball by the dense crowd while his attention is distracted talking to a hooker, something is sticking out his pocket and so, on impulse, Chevette nicks it, and is out the apartment door and over to a service elevator, down to the car park, unlocks her bike and is off into the city within minutes…

This turns out to be the core of the plot. Without realising it, Chevette has stolen a very expensive pair of sunglasses. Why? Because they are Virtual Light shades, see below.

Chevette lives high up on the Golden Gate Bridge with a broken-down old man named Skinner in a shack he’s built high up amid the cabling. In the years since the earthquake, thousands of homeless people have constructed a shanty town in the sky, building home-made apartments which have slowly crept up the struts and along the cables of the old bridge till it looks like a giant crustacean, covered with Gothic excrescences.

Skinner is regularly visited by Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist who is writing a study of how the bridge was colonised and so interviews Skinner because he was one of the ‘pioneers’ of its settlement. T, this being a handy prompt for a series of flashbacks or retellings from Skinner of how it all happened. Yamazaki is not, however, an impressive or powerful figure; when we see Yamazaki from Chevette’s viewpoint, he is ‘the Japanese nerd… the college boy or social worker’ who always looks lost.

LA Back in Los Angeles, Rydell – having been suspended from work by IntenSecurity – is told by his immediate boss Juanito Hernandez about a job opportunity, working for a freelance security operative, Lucius Warbaby, up in San Francisco. Rydell needs a job so he flies economy up to Frisco sitting next to a sweet old lady who goes on about having to arrange for her husband’s brain, which is in cryogenic storage, to be moved to a better facility. The wacky old future, eh.

Rydell is met at the airport by huge black Lucius Warbaby and his gofer, Freddie (both described on page 80). Freddie’s loud shirt is covered with images of guns, Warbaby has a brace on one leg and walks with a cane. He is the size of a refrigerator but stylish and dignified.

San Francisco Chevette works for Allied Couriers. She’s called in for a grilling by her boss, Bunny Malatesta (p.94) who asks why she checked in to Hotel Morrissey security (on the job where she strayed into the party) but never checked out. The hotel is following it up because the heat is on about the missing shades. In fact, Bunny tells her, the heat is turned up because the owner of the shades has been murdered.

In the next scene Rydell is with Warbaby when he meets two SF homicide cops who are investigating the self-same murder, of Hans Rutger Blix (p.102). The cops are Russians, Svobodov and Orlonsky. Warbaby is a big man but precise and punctilious and polite; he has beautiful handwriting (p.163). He reminds me a bit of the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon.

Chevette’s courier colleague, a beautiful black man named Samuel Saladin DuPree (p.129), or Sammy Sal, gets her to admit to stealing the shades. She shows them to him and he explains that the shades are Virtual Light sunglasses (p.113). They interact directly with the optical nerve without needing actual light. Sammy explains they’re fairly common among professionals, like a hologram.

In fact Warbaby has a pair which he uses when he takes Freddie and Rydell to the crime scene – the hotel room where Blix was murdered – and further explains that the VL shades have ‘drivers’ in the lenses and frames which affect the optic nerves directly (p.120).

Freddie takes Rydell shopping to ‘Container City’, comprised of loads of derelict cargo ships and their containers with stairways strung up and between them, very trash futuristic, maybe like the final scene in the movie I, Robot.

A character named Loveless, a hired thug, arrives at Skinner’s shack on the Bridge with a gun. Chevette is up on the roof with Sammy. Loveless doesn’t see Sammy but orders Chevette to climb down and back into Skinner’s shack. He handcuffs Skinner and Yamazaki with funky futuristic handcuffs made of flexible plastic which tighten if you struggle against them.

Loveless has come looking for the stolen shades. Chevette lies and tells him they’re in the pannier of her bicycle so he forces her down ladders towards the rigged-up lift which takes them down to road level. Here Chevette cleverly arranges for the bike’s electric defence mechanism to give Loveless an electric.

Sammy has silently followed them both down to street level and now bops Loveless on the head but not hard enough. He just has time to hand Chevette back the shades (he’d been holding them up on the roof when Loveless appeared in Skinner’s apartment) before a dazed Loveless staggers back to his feet and pumps Sammy full of lead – Sammy simply disappearing backwards between the cables off the bridge and falling to his death. Shocked, Chevette just turns and runs.

Meanwhile, Warbaby and Freddie arrive with Rydell at the base of the bridge and send him onto it to find Chevette, they being scared by exaggerated stories of its voodoo, cannibalistic inhabitants.

To ensure drama, a heavy rainstorm comes on and in the thick of it Rydell stumbles across Chevette standing in the rain. He tails her as she staggers along the bridge in the rainstorm and comes across her one-time boyfriend, Lowell, and his ghoulish sidekick Cody, sitting atop a container.

Rydell tails the three as they head off to a bar, humorously named Cognitive Dissidence. Rydell goes into the warm fug of the bar after them, taking a place at the bar and ordering a beer while he ponders what to do next. But into this bar suddenly arrives one of the two Russian homicide cops Warbaby had introduced him to soon after he arrived in SF, coming in huge and silent and with a drawn gun. He orders Chevette to come with him but then…all the lights go out.

In the darkness the fat lady who operates a dancing hologram which is a feature of the bar, makes it dance all round the Russian’s head, giving Rydell long enough to make it across the bar, scoop up Chevette and carry her kicking and screaming to the stairs out of the place. Unfortunately, he runs straight into the other Russian waiting at the top of the stairs who stops them. Rydell and Chevette are both disarmed and handcuffed and forced to trudge under the watchful guns of the Russians to the San Francisco end of the bridge.

Here Warbaby and Freddie, who commissioned the Russian heavies, are waiting for them. They unhandcuff Rydell and are beginning to explain what’s going on when there is another dramatic surprise: one of Chevette’s friends who we’d been very briefly introduced to a bit earlier, a big bear of a man incongruously named Nigel, seeing Chevette taken away at gunpoint, now attacks everyone on a heavyweight bike, ramming the Russian with the gun, grabbing him and banging his head against the hood of Rydell’s car.

As the others set about dealing with this Nigel, Rydell drags Chevette into his Patriot 4 x 4, kick starts it and they skid off, Warbaby raising his cane which turns out to be a concealed gun and shooting out the Patriot’s rear window, but then they’ve turned a corner and are escaping!

Chevette directs Rydell to Haight Street, where they drop the Patriot (which is promptly stolen) and hide out in a tattoo parlour, pretending to take their time in the waiting room deciding on a joint tattoo, while they calm down.

When they eventually leave the tattoo parlour, in a striking coincidence, who should stop and ask the way but the nice old lady Rydell had chatted to on the plane up here, Mrs Danica Elliott, who has hired a big white camper van to drive back to LA in. She asks Rydell if he can drive since she is completely lost. So he and Chevette get in and drive nice and slow out of town. Eventually they’re so tired they hand the driving back to Mrs Elliott and go to sleep in the bed in the back of the camper.

BUT – when they wake up the camper is stationary and Mrs Elliott is gone and who else but Loveless, the hired killer, is waiting for them! I had a sinking feeling that he might have murdered the old lady (one gets sick of all the murder and carnage in American novels) and so was relieved to discover she was herself an IntenSecurity operative put in place to tail and watch Rydell.

Loveless now proceeds to explain The PLOT. The Virtual Light shades Chevette stole contain the blueprint for the comprehensive rebuilding of shattered San Francisco by foreign investors. These are based in Costa Rica (which has been mentioned a number of times as the location for stored data in the same way Switzerland is for huge foreign bank accounts in our day).

The rebuilding project has to be handled carefully because the local Americans might object, but the core issue is that big corporations want to buy up the land the new city is going to be built on. So if the plans get out, all sorts of other actors (for example, the state) might buy it up instead. Thus the precise plans must be kept secret because inconceivably vast fortunes stand to be made or lost.

And it all comes down to possession of the shades. Blix was a courier tasked with delivering them to the right person in San Francisco, but instead let himself be distracted, getting drunk at that party and then stupidly losing them (when Chevette picked his pocket). Loveless had been tasked with shadowing Blix and when the latter lost the shades was only too happy to murder him, not just killing him but slitting his throat and pulling his tongue out to make it look like some South American drug killing.

While Loveless is talking he gets thirsty and orders Chevette to get him a drink from the camper’s fridge, nice and slow. Out of his sight, Chevette slips into Loveless’s drink an entire stash of the designer drug dancer, and hands it to him. Thus, as Loveless carries on explaining The Plot to Rydell and Chevette, he starts to sweat and hallucinate, and ends up firing his pistol manically. Rydell and Chevette throw themselves out the doors, and hide while Loveless runs off shooting wildly. Then they jump back into the camper and make off at speed.

Rydell and Chevette stop to get directions from an old-timer at a derelict Shell gas station. Rydell had used a phone they picked up in their adventures to ring the only person he trusts, Sublett, who we met back at the start of the story – only to discover Sublett has quit his job at IntenSecurity and gone home to his mother’s trailer on a wacky Christian base camp. Looking at the map Rydell realises it’s fairly close by, so Rydell and Chevette drive there and bluff their way in by pretending to be extreme born-again Christians.

There follows extended satire about TV evangelists, in this instance a fictional one named the Reverend Fallon. This actually feels quite old now, very 1980s. No-one cares about TV evangelists any more, compared to the power of the internet, social media, Facebook, the Russians and President Trump.

Rydell devises A Cunning Plan. First he calls Chevette’s ex, Lowell, and puts the frighteners on him to get him to give them access to the digital online place known as ‘the Republic of Desire’. Then he ascertains that one of Sublett’s nerdy friends in the born-again caravan park, Buddy, has a set of eyephones. He pays Buddy to use them, then Chevette watches as Rydell puts them on and dials into early cyberspace.

Rydell has got details of how to dial into the Republic of Desire and here, in cyberspace, sees three weird figures, a woman made of TV shows, a man mountain and a kind of Tyrannosaurus Rex with human hands. These three entities instantly access Rydell’s records and read everything about his life and history, are bored and are leaving the call when Rydell asks them whether any of them lives in San Francisco and likes it the way it is. This gets their attention and Rydell goes on to explain how the plans stored on the Virtual Light sunglasses reveal how San Francisco is going to be handed over to foreign developers and changed out of all recognition. That gets the three digital warriors’ attention.

Together they cook up a plan which dominates the last thirty pages of the novel, which feels like a scam or heist in the style of Ocean’s 11.

Chevette dresses as a courier and enters Century City II, the luxury condo where Rydell had briefly lived with top lawyer Karen Mendelson when they had their brief affair. Soon as Karen Mendelson opens her apartment door, Sublett pushes her and Chevette back into her apartment.

Meanwhile Rydell has recruited the three hackers in the Republic of Desire to help him. The man mountain figure refers to himself as the God-Eater, but they could be anyone, anywhere, Rydell reflects ruefully. Rydell makes his way to Century City II, where he’s arranged to meet Warbaby at 3pm. He watches Warbaby and Freddie and the two Russian hoods (the Bad Guys) arrive in two separate cars, then enter the mall. He follows them up inside, then phones the three hackers in the Republic of Desire again. The narrative explains that they decided to ‘help’ because they don’t want to see San Francisco over-developed and also it presented a new technical challenge, which amuses them.

What happens is: the hackers take control of SF police in order to fly armed drones into the mall which tell Warbaby, Freddie and the Russians to get on their faces. This is because the system has been hacked to identify them of being terrorists planning to blow up the entire mall.

But where’s their hired goon, Loveless? Seeing he hasn’t come along with Warbaby, Rydall guesses he must have gone straight to Karen’s apartment. Rydell dashes up there and arrives just in time, just at the split second Loveless emerges from hiding and raises his little gun to Chevette’s temple planning to take her hostage or just to shoot her. And that’s the moment Rydell hits him with the capsicum spray he carries round with him like mace gas only much worse.

Epilogue

Then – The Payoff. The cops arrest the five baddies, Warbaby, Freddie, the two Russian hoods and Loveless. Then a whole fleet of Karen Mendelson’s lawyer friends arrive, including the legendary lawyer Wellington Ma, and these media operators immediately see the TV potential of the story and so sign up Chevette and Sublett to tell their stories. While Chevette had been in the apartment with Karen she’d shown her how to play the Virtual Shades, so Karen has seen the development scams which were planned and is able to retell it to her lawyers and the cops. Rydell et al are in the clear, and a good TV show will be made about it all, and the baddies will be brought down. Rydell et al will be arrested but the head lawyer from Cops in Trouble tells him they’ll get bail within the hour and then they can start working on the documentary and then the made-for-TV movie.

In other words – despite the futuristic sci-fi trappings – this feels, in the end, like an American crime caper: the goody is a cop with a heart of the gold, the young girl assistant has nice ‘tits’ (as Rydell puts it, more than once) the baddies are crooked property developers, foreigners and blacks – and everything will be sorted out by shit-hot LA TV lawyers.

Ultimately, feels more like an episode of LA Law than genuine science fiction.

Features of Gibson’s futureworld of 2006

the President is a woman named Millband (p.17) and is black! (p.183)
there’s a vaccination against AIDS (p.18) seems you need certificates of vaccination to show partners before having sex (p.21), the origin of the vaccine is just one individual, J.D. Shapely, who was found to host a benign version of HIV which eradicated the malign version (see below)
cops wear air-conditioned helmets with plastic visors
‘gyms’ offer injections of Brazilian fetal matter and having your skeleton ‘reinforced’
Italy is no longer a unified state, people come from parts of ‘what used to be Italy’ (p.40) (cf Canada, below)
Chevette’s motorbike has a recognition loop you slip your hand into to unlock it (p.44)
swimwear is designed to keep off dangerous UV rays and to keep out the dangerous poisons in the sea
the ozone hole is a problem (p.46)
a virus has destroyed palm trees (maybe all trees) (p.50), later identified as ‘some Mexican virus’ (p.273)
five dollar coins, suggesting inflation (p.58)
Thomasson is a generic name Gibson’s invented for pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape (p.61)
the big nations of the world (Russia, Canada, Brazil) have fragmented into numerous mini-states (p.71), Canada has broken up into five states (p.242)
the Cease Upon The Midnight movement and other self-help euthanasia groups prefer peaceful suicide to having your brain put in a cryogenic store (p.79)
it’s been illegal to manufacture cigarettes in the US since 2000 (p.101)
the Sword of the Pig movement (p.108)
after the earthquake there seem to have been waves of disease or ‘plagues’, which Gibson lists on page 117
New Zealand appears to have been occupied by Japanese armed forces who have to suppress resistance movements (p.190)
much is made throughout the book of posters and image of AIDS survivor J.D. Shapely dotted around San Francisco and, at one point, Yamazaki channel surfs to a BBC documentary which gives an extremely thorough biography of Shapely (pages 190 to 192). Shapely was a gay prostitute who ended up in prison where they discovered he had AIDS but it didn’t kill him; in him HIV had mutated to a strain which was a) benign b) ate the original virulent strain. Thus a vaccine was made from his version and was administered to everyone in the world.

Funky phrases

So rich in slang and neologisms, American writers.

inner trivia banks (p.14)
telepresence rig (p.15)
Thiobuscaline (3,5-dimethoxy-4-butylthiophenethylamine) – a lesser-known psychedelic drug (p.16)
bunny down (p.75)

Conclusion

My opening comments reflected my memories of the Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s place in science fiction. As I read on into this novel I came to realise it is far less a science fiction book than a techno update of the long lineage of noir cop crime thrillers; that Gibson’s hard-nosed cop with a heart of gold has more in common with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, or Deckard in the movie Blade Runner or John McClane in the Die Hard franchise than with more standard science fiction; i.e. that Rydell is an avatar of a very familiar type, the tall, handsome, strong cop or ex-cop, rough around the edges, prepared to bend the rules, but basically a good guy.

Similarly, although Chevette is a ballsy, street girl, an urchin, a reform school runaway, she, also, has a heart of gold and has to be rescued by Sir Galahad, thus fulfilling a thousand-year old stereotype. And – sigh – she, of course, starts to fall for him.

She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell… she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. (p.261)
She was starting to really like him… (p.276)

Rydell reminds me most of Lee Child’s creation, Jack Reacher, another knight errant who combines physical prowess with basic moral rectitude (although, admittedly, Reacher didn’t make his debut till 1997, four years after this novel was published).

They all supply the reader with the same basic pleasure, which is they’re rule-breakers and naughty boys who are, at heart, good boys really. No matter how much they bend or break the law, it’s always in a good cause. And they all combine a bunch of characteristics most men wish they had – size and strength and physical prowess, expertise with guns, all kinds of practical know-how with cars and gadgets – and their basic decency wins over even the most initially independent or resistant of women.

To quote a seventy-year-old tagline, ‘Men want to be him; women want to be with him’ (James Bond memes)

In other words, the setting of the Bridge trilogy is novel and creative, and the hundreds of details Gibson works into the novel certainly convey a great fullness and plausibility to his fictional world. But the basic narrative structure is very, very old.

Nothing dates as fast as the future

One last thought: setting the novel closer to the present day, paradoxically makes it more dated. In the far future (well, the 2030s when Neuromancer is set) anything goes. But if you set something in the near future, you have to be more measured and realistic with your predictions and chances increase that whatever you predict will be wrong.

Thus some of the baddies in the book, like Warbaby, get their information via faxes; computers are used a bit but nowhere near as much as they turned out to; there are one or two remote phones but not many – in other words Gibson did not accurately predict the full impact of the great transformative agents of our time, the internet, increasingly lightweight personal computers, and mobile phones.

And his cultural references feel dated, as well. As in the Sprawl novels, many things have a strong Japanese flavour i.e. the inclusion of the Japanese character Yamazaki and repeated references to a catastrophic earthquake that’s taken place in Tokyo. But in the years since 1993, Japan has slipped out of the cool cultural and economic position Gibson gives it:

Japan’s economy has struggled with deflation since its bubble economy peaked in 1989. (Investopedia)

Japan has, since the turn of the century, in terms of culture and economy and products and even art, increasingly been replaced by China.

Also Gibson’s pop culture references have aged. The entire concept of rock music, which is referenced throughout the novel, seems old now. The character Sublett has an obsession with the movies of David Cronenberg, which might have marked him off as at the cutting edge of pop avant-garde in 1993, but not now, in 2020.

Credit

Virtual Light by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1993. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.

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3 Comments

by Simon on April 12, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Science Fiction

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Posted by Simon on April 12, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/virtual-light-william-gibson/

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (1988)

I’m discovering that the three novels of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl trilogy’ are more connected than I expected, featuring some of the same characters, themes and locations.

Like Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive opens with chapters explaining the set-up and situation of five different and apparently unconnected characters – so we straightaway realise that, as with Zero, part of the ‘interest’ of reading the book is going to be in finding out how these disparate personages are going to be woven together into one narrative.

But we also quickly realise that we’ve met some of these characters in the previous books and that this one represents a continuation of their stories, and so is a true sequel and not just set in the same fictional universe.

Kumiko

Kumiko Yanaka is the 13-year-old daughter of the head of a powerful corporation in Japan. The book opens in the confusing days after her mad (Danish) mother has committed suicide. Some kind of potentially violent infighting among the corporations is kicking off and her Dad has sent Kumiko to London to be out of the way of danger. She is met at Heathrow by a crop-headed, burly minder named, improbably enough, Petal, who drives her in a Jaguar along the M4 and to a safe house in Notting Hill, owned by one Roger Swain.

Her father gave her a device which, at a touch, projects a life-sized hologram of a chatty man named Colin who a) only Kumiko can see and b) has wide general knowledge, can access local computer and information systems, and so can give Kumiko advice. A cyber-guardian.

Next day she meets the owner of the house, Roger Swain, and an American woman with metallic lenses instead of eyes, named Sally Shears. Swain and Petal let Sally take Kumiko for a walk round the neighbourhood, in the falling snow, shopping and into a pub, where Sally explains that Kumiko is here because of an outbreak of infighting among the Yakuza (the Japanese mafia). So – her father is a senior member of a worldwide criminal consortium.

The device which projects Colin can also record. Colin tells Kumiko to hide it in Swain’s office and then reclaim it later in the day. They replay a conversation between Swain and Petal which mentions Angie Mitchell. If I’m not mistaken it hints at plans to kidnap her. Who she?

Angela Mitchell

Young Angie Mitchell was the central figure in the previous novel, Count Zero. A gang of professional kidnappers was expecting to extract her father, the star scientist Chris Mitchell, from the grip of a big multinational corporation, Maas Biolabs, and was surprised when she turned up instead, his teenage daughter.

It was later revealed that Mitchell had a) put her into the ultralight designed for him to escape in from the Maas Biolab compound, and b) then cut his own throat. Head of the extraction gang, tall rangy Turner, then took Angie on a cross-country odyssey, fleeing from agents of the vengeful Maas (and also Hosaka, the corporation who hired Turner and suspected some kind of double cross when Mitchell didn’t arrive). During this road trip it had become clear that Angie was special because a) Mitchell had embedded some kind of substance in her brain, presumably an example of the advanced ‘biosoft’ technology he was working on, so that b) Angie was able to tune into cyberspace without using any devices – without touching a console or dermatrodes, she could simply… enter cyberspace. And because of this unique ability, c) Angie had powerful dreams and visions in which she was visited by traditional voodoo gods and goddesses.

Indeed, it eventually was hinted that Mitchell had in fact been a pretty mediocre researcher but had stumbled across contact with the voodoo gods, who gave him the secrets of advanced tech (and thus made his career) in exchange for his daughter. What did they want with his daughter? That was hard to really make out, even by the end of the previous book.

Voodoo? Yes, these presences are powerful inside cyberspace but also capable of reaching out to speak through the minds and voices of humans outside cyberspace. At the end of the Count Zero it is explained that these entities are a legacy of the great Unification of Cyberspace which took place at the climax of Neuromancer, had then somehow fallen apart again into separate but related, super-powerful cyber-entities which had ranged over the whole history of human signs and symbols and discovered that the voodoo gods and goddesses of Haiti were the most convenient, appropriate guise in which to interface with human beings.

So much for the events in Count Zero. Now, in the opening chapters of this book, we cut to seven years later, years in which Angie has become a super-famous stimstim star (simstim being an advanced form of television in which people enter into the bodies and sensations of lead characters).

We learn that Angie has replaced Tally Isham, who was mentioned throughout the previous two novels as being the great simstim star of the age. But we also learn that the price of fame, and trying to deal with the occasional return of the voodoo voices in her head, has prompted a major league drug addiction, to a designer drug DMSO which helps suppress the voices and the memory of the traumatic events, including her father’s death, of seven years earlier.

Angie has been sent by her concerned superiors at the simstim corporation Sense/Net to a rehab clinic, but checked out after just a week and, as the novel opens, has arrived at a windy, abandoned, luxury house on the beach in California – Malibu to be precise.

Here she pads around the silent rooms, trying to get her head together, trying to resist the temptation to take a hit of the (futuristic) drug she was addicted to, all the while spied on by her boss, Hilton Swift, who makes regular phone calls to check she’s alright.

Count Zero

Then there’s a series of chapters which are written in a different, far more louche tone, as if from a sci fi comic or manga magazine.

Kid Afrika (who is black) is chauffeured across the crushed steel surface of ‘Dog Solitude’ in a Dodge hovercraft (reminiscent of the hovercraft in which Turner drives Angie in Count Zero) driven by a white girl named Cherry Chesterfield to ‘the Factory’, some kind of derelict building.

They’re spotted approaching by the retarded Little Bird who points the hovercraft out to Slick Henry, who is working on a huge sculpture titled ‘the Judge’. Got all that?

In the back of the hovercraft is a comatose body on a stretcher which Kid refers to as ‘the Count’. In a flash we realise this is Bobby Newmark, also known as Count Zero, a young computer hacker (or ‘hotdogger’) from the New Jersey slums, who gave the previous novel its title.

Kid Afrika has orders to hide Count Zero and wants Slick Henry to take him in. Henry is reluctant because he knows that the secretive Gentry, the man who first discovered the (abandoned) Factory and moved into it and, effectively, owns it, will not approve. Gentry hates people.

But the Kid reminds Slick Henry that he saved the latter’s life once and owes him a big favour. Reluctantly, Henry takes him in, accompanied by Cherry who will act as a sort of nurse to the comatose Count… leaving the reader wondering what happened to the Count and why he’s been sent here.

Mona

Mona is 16 and SINless i.e. does not have a Single Identification Number and so is off the grid of social security etc.

She lives with her pimp, Eddy, in a shitty, flyblown squat in Florida where he’s brought her, from Cleveland where she used to do erotic dancing in a seedy bar, in hope of making more money. Florida turns out to be polluted and dirty. Eddy sends her out to do tricks, beats her if she disobeys or complains, takes her money and then makes her describe the encounters to him, to make him hard so he can fuck her.

The whole milieu is painted with grim and depressing conviction.

After a chapter or two to establish this sordid set-up, Eddy suddenly introduces Mona to a smartly dressed man named Prior. To her surprise they are taken to an airport, loaded into a private jet and fly to Atlanta. Here they are taken to a swish hotel and next thing Mona knows she is having a medical checkover by a man named Gerald. Gerald and Prior seem to be discussing Mona’s appropriateness for some task – the colour of her eyes, her dental records, her age all appear to be relevant.

Now there have been several clues as to what’s going on:

a) In an earlier passage where Mona had gone shopping, she’d spotted a poster of Angie Mitchell and reflected that people sometimes remarked on her looking like the great simstim star. b) In the next chapter we are with Kumiko as she and Colin listen to a playback of the conversations they’d bugged between her ‘hosts’. They hear Swain discussing with Sally Shears an ‘extraction’ job, and talking about the way ‘the target’ is back in ‘the house on the coast.’

All this sounds like what we’ve learned about Angie Mitchell as she potters about the big house in Malibu. Swain goes on to say that ‘they’ (the unspecified client) don’t want her extracted by any number of mercs they could hire, but specifically by Sally Shears. And, he adds, there’s a new instruction: the client wants to make it look as if she’d been killed in the kidnapping. The client will provide a body.

Recap

So, by page 100 of this 300-page book, the reader has grasped that it’s going to be about a gang of crims, somehow organised by London-based Swain, and featuring lens-eyed Sally Shears, who plan to kidnap simstim star Angie Mitchell (for what reasons, we will presumably find out) and we can deduce that the lowlife hooker Mona has been shipped to a hotel and given a medical examination because ‘they’ plan to kill her and probably burn or mutilate her body enough to make investigators think it is Angie’s (an idea which seemed, to this reader, remarkably low-tech: don’t they have DNA forensics in this otherwise hi-tech future?)

Backgrounds

Threaded in between the storylines, we learn a lot more of the background to this futureworld, aspects which help shed light on the earlier two novels.

We learn what you might call conventional aspects of any sc-fi story set in Earth’s future, those hints and tips about future apocalypses which titillate the viewer’s taste for catastrophe. For example, we get a few more details about the ‘three week war’ which obliterated Bonn in a nuclear strike and resulted in clouds of radiation drifting west which led to food shortages in Britain. Petal shows Kumiko a hologram constructed from old footage of the Battle of Britain, created, he tells her, to commemorate the centenary i.e. 2040. Now since in an earlier novel we’d read about the ‘law of ’53’, presumably 2053, I’m guessing the action is set somewhere in the 2060s, maybe 2070s.

I couldn’t help feeling this third novel has, at least to begin with, a middle-aged feel: it doesn’t kick off at a furious headlong pace in a flood of amphetamine-fulled prose like Neuromancer, but takes its time and spreads.

Thus the book takes its time to give each of the characters a hefty backstory, even the hooker Mona, starting with her time back as a kid working on a crayfish farm and following through her sorry life to date, liberated from a crappy manual job by stylish confident Eddy, who turns out to be a pimp and beater.

We learn that Slick Henry committed a series of crimes – stealing cars apparently – he was caught and punished by having his memory permanently damaged via the technique of Induced Korsakov’s Syndrome. It flares up when he’s under pressure and he can only remember five minutes back…

Dog Solitude, we learn, is a vast landfill site full of toxic rubbish, somewhere beyond New Jersey. When it was finally full to overflowing rollers or something heavy were sent across its surface to crush and flatten the metal objects, resulting in the whole thing becoming an uneven but essentially flat surface of billions of tin cans and appliances and crushed cars. Nothing grows there, the rain collects in toxic puddles and, because of the unevenness, only hovercraft can cross it.

Slick Henry, for his own psychological reasons, is assembling vast sculptures, symbols of the authority figures who locked him up and stole his memory, while Gentry, the misanthropic owner of the Factory – a vast derelict building with flaps of waste plastic clumsily stapled over its long-smashed windows – is pursuing some quixotic quest into discovering the meaning and shape of the matrix of cyberspace.

And this rhymes, chimes and echoes Angie’s preoccupation with understanding the beings, the entities, which can enter, access and ‘ride’ her mind, what the two black men she met in Count Zero used Haitian voodoo terminology to refer to as loa.

So much for the characters’ backstories.

Tessier-Ashpool again

In among all these themes and stories, I was surprised at the way that for the third time the orbiting space station owned by the legendarily wealthy Tessier-Ashpool once again emerges as an idea and destination for the characters.

Tessier-Ashpool in Neuromancer

You will recall that in Neuromancer, the protagonists Case and Molly, helped by the cloned daughter of the billionaire Ashpool, 3Jane, fulfil the task set them of activating a codeword which allows the two separate parts, the two ‘lobes’ of the matrix – named Wintermute and Neuromancer – to unite. The rather visionary, transcendent result is that, right at the end of that novel, the matrix becomes self aware. All of this takes place in the orbiting space station, Freeside, created by the fabulously rich Tessier-Ashpool family.

Tessier-Ashpool in Count Zero

Count Zero is set 7 or 8 years later and brings Angie Mitchell, smuggled out of Maas Biolabs’ clutches to freedom and brought to a nightclub in New York, where she meets some heavy-duty black guys who explain to her that, above and beyond its rational business content, cyberspace is also possessed by strange religious god-like entities called loas, who have the names of Haitian voodoo gods (for example Baron Samedi).

Count Zero climaxes when the young art expert, Marly, fulfils the commission given her by the world’s richest man, Josef Virek, to discover the creator of a strange and haunting artwork – a vitrine filled with seven or so random objects. She follows the trail out into space, to very same orbiting space station, Freeside, more specifically to the section of it which the Tessier-Ashpool family created as its own private fortress and which has, since the events of Neuromancer, been ‘sawn off’ from Freeside and placed into its own orbit.

Here Marly discovers that someone has created a vast sphere with no gravity inside this space station, in which a cornucopia of rubbish and random objects floats slowly around, while a multi-armed robot device grabs random items as they float by, while other robot arms use lasers to shape and mould the objects, which are then placed in these vitrines. The whole thing is devoted to creating Damien Hirst-style artworks.

At the climax of the novel, the face of Josef Virek, the richest man in the world, who had given Marly her quest, appears on a monitor in this dome and tells her his people have followed her and are about to enter the dome. He thinks he is on the brink of getting his hands on a super-advanced technology which will give him immortality. I think what happens next is that we learn the dome, its robot artist and the haunting vitrines are all products of the loa, the self-aware entities within cyberspace. Marly’s quest was part of a scheme by the loa to lure Virek to his death and, sure enough, while logged into cyberspace in order to communicate with Marly, he is killed by the loa, thus freeing Marly from her quest.

Tessier-Ashpool in Mona Lisa Overdrive

Now, in this novel, Angie, on a very slender pretext, finds herself becoming obsessed with the Tessier-Ashpool family. She discovers that one of her simstim’s technical team had used the show’s recent break (while she was in the rehab clinic) to go ‘up the well’ (i.e. into space) to delve into the Tessier-Ashpool story. She asks for a copy of a recent documentary made into the mysterious fate of the Tessier-Ashpool family, which she watches several times, her viewings being opportunities for Gibson to feed us more bits of backstory.

Half way through Mona Lisa I had become a little bored of this Tessier-Ashpool theme. It seemed to me to close down the novel’s possibilities. It is a big world and, if you throw in space stations and extra-terrestrial travel, it is a very big world. It seemed oddly spastic for the stories to have to return to the same setting.

I thought Gibson is going to have to pull something pretty impressive out of the hat if he’s going to trump a) the climax of Neuromancer in which cyberspace becomes self aware! or b) the climax of Count Zero, with its hallucinatory vision of cyberspace being taken over by voudou gods!

Puzzles

This third of the Sprawl trilogy makes Gibson’s modus operandi clearer than ever. The main characteristic of the books is that they are deliberately confusing.

At the end of most thrillers there is some kind of explanation of what happened and often authors are considerate enough to tie up the loose ends. In Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive I was left more confused by the denouements than by the chase. I don’t think they can be summarised, really, because there are about ten named characters and all of them have shifting theories about what is actually going on, and the voices in the matrix themselves give changing interpretations of what is happening and why.

The result is a gathering sense of excitement, with a number of chases and battle confrontations all going off at the same time – but only a very confused sense of what is at stake. Something desperately important is at stake but, for most of the novel, it is hard to understand what.

For example, Kumiko escapes from the minder set to accompany her on a shopping trip around Portobello Road, and makes it across London to Brixton, to the scuzzy flat of the cockney console-cowboy Tick (real name, Terrance) who Sally Shears had introduced her to in a pub in Notting Hill early on.

Tick hands her some ‘trodes and takes her into cyberspace to show her a mystery which is puzzling the millions of other cyberjockeys around the world, which is the arrival of a huge new ‘building’ or artefact of gleaming data in the matrix. Why did Sally tell Kumiko to go to Tick’s? Who is Tick, really? What is the mystery of the shining artifact?

All that is relatively clear is that Swain’s men as well as the regular police will be out searching for Kumiko in force i.e. there is a strong sense of menace and paranoia.

Also, about a hundred pages we are explicitly told – if we hadn’t guessed it already – that ‘Sally Shears’ is none other than Molly Millions, the female lead in Neuromancer, characterised by her distinctive metallic lens implants where her eyes ought to be, and the 4-centimetre long retractable razor knives under her fingernails.

From various conversations Kumiko has overheard or we have witnessed, we realise she is a central part of the plan to kidnap Angie Mitchell, and that she is mighty unhappy about it. She says she’s only doing it because she’s being blackmailed and Swain says he’s only doing it because he’s being blackmailed, too, and I think – if I understood correctly – that they’re both being blackmailed into doing it by 3Jane, the mad daughter of Ashpool from Neuromancer, who is dead, but exists as an AI or ‘construct’.

More plot

Going back on the plan and abandoning Swain, Molly a) tells Kumiko to escape to the safety of Tick’s flat, while b) she, Molly, flees to America. First thing we know about her arrival is when she breaks into the clinic where Mona is having plastic surgery done on her to make her look like Angie Mitchell. The clinic door explodes as the minder, Prior, comes flying through it, followed by rough, tough Molly. She grabs Mona and escapes with her. (This is possible because she’s been tipped off about the surgery by the plastic surgeon, Gerald [did he do her lens-eyes, the reader idly wonders?])

Molly takes Mona off in a car and drives to New York, where she parks atop a multi-story car park and disappears, telling Mona to stay put.

Then we cut to Angie. In the intervening chapters she has more or less ‘recovered’ and agreed with her boss that she is ready to return to broadcasting. Her technical crew arrive, including hair stylists, make-up and so on, and then she flies back to New York, arriving by swanky corporate helicopter at the city’s smartest hotel, whose the top floors are permanently rented by her employers. Sense/Net. Remember, she is the most famous and highest paid simstim star in the world.

But Angie’s chopper has barely landed before Molly forces open the door, shoots Angie’s smooth gay black minder, Porphyre, with a stun dart, commandeers and flies the chopper over to the car park where she’d left Mona, and bundles Angie out of the chopper and into the back of the car.

Here, scared teenage Mona, doctored to look like Angie, meets her heroine, and Angie reacts with movie star aplomb to coming face to face with a clone of herself. Meanwhile, tough Molly is driving them off at speed, in fact, driving the car up the ramp into a nearby empty hovercraft which she proceeds to steal.

Meanwhile, in the derelict factory in the waste land beyond New Jersey, Gentry has become resigned to the presence of the comatose Count Zero at the Factory, because he’s jacked into the Count’s mind and realised that the Count, like him (Gentry), is on a mission, on a quest, to understand what’s happened to the matrix.

They both know that at some point, 14 years earlier, something changed in cyberspace. In their different ways they have pieced together the story told in Neuromancer, namely that Case and Molly oversaw the unification of the two lobes of an AI so enormous it effectively became cyberspace.

What is genuinely puzzling to this reader is the way Neuromancer climaxes with the matrix becoming self-aware at the climax of a thrilling, scary novel, but then the threat of the entire digital realm becoming self-aware is frittered away in the subsequent books.

At the very end of Neuromancer I thought it was going to become like the terrifying moment in the Terminator story, where the newly self-aware world computer declares war on its human creators.

But no. Nothing like that happens. Instead that-which-had-become-one appears to disintegrate again into a number of different entities and this fundamental oddity is compounded in Count Zero when we learn that these fragments have taken the shape and names and behaviour of the gods of voudou.

These are the Horsemen which dominated Angie’s mind in Count Zero and become increasingly present to her as Mona Lisa progresses:

And there they were, the Horsemen, the loa: Pappa Legba bright and fluid as mercury; Ezili Freda who is mother and queen; Samedi, the Baron Cimetiere, moss on corroded bone; Similor; Madame Travaux; many others… They fill the hollow that is Grande Brigitte. The rushing of their voices is the sound of wind, running water… (p.262)

We learn as the novel proceeds that this is why Angie became addicted to the drugs, because the drugs stopped her dreaming about the voudou horsemen.

But when the voices come through – the voice of Mamman Brigitte in particular being the dominant one in this novel – their explanations are even more confusing than in Zero.

They speak in highly mystical language: the loa came out of Africa but not as we (modern Caucasians) know them; Legba-ati-Bon – who rode Angie seven years ago at the climax of Zero – has also yet to come into existence i.e. he is and yet is not.

They confirm that the events at the climax of Neuromancer did indeed give rise to The One, but there was also an ‘other’. Then the centre failed and every fragment rushed away, each fragment seeking a form. Brigitte explains that, of all the signs and symbologies created by humanity, ‘the paradigms of voudou proved most appropriate’ (p.264).

But even if you’ve managed to process this, it is still not clear, even by the end of the book, what she is on about: more appropriate for what? For what purpose?

Brigitte confirms that it was the loa who approached Angie’s father, Chris Mitchell, star scientist of Maas Biolabs and offered him secrets; in return for this knowledge, he implanted biochemical programmes in Angie’s brain which made it easier for her to see the loa without jacking into cyberspace.

OK. But why?

And, as the novel progresses, Angie also realises that she has been seeing 3Jane’s dreams, memories of events which took place inside the Tessier-Ashpool fortress – but why? How is that possible and what does it mean?

My point is that – beneath the speed-driven, slangy, tech-jargon prose, and beneath the thriller motifs of gangsters and criminal cartels, and beneath the genuinely gripping, real world situations of kidnaps, and high speed chases, and getaways, and firefights – and even beneath the neon grid vision of cyberspace into which the characters pop with just enough regularity to remind us that depicting cyberspace is Gibson’s métier and USP – at the heart of all three novels in the Sprawl trilogy is a surprisingly mystical, non-rational and deeply confusing core.

If they were about money or drugs or gold or smuggling or guns or espionage or any of the other common thriller tropes, it would be one thing. But all three novels end up being about strange, mystical changes within cyberspace which all the books’ characters themselves don’t understand.

On balance this is a plus. It makes them rereadable. Usually at the end of a thriller the game is given away and we know whodunnit and why. Not in these books. They have all the structure and many of the trappings of conventional thrillers, plus all the hi-tech, lowlife drug paraphernalia thrown in. But at heart they remain oddly, eerily unknowable.

The last battle

The novel heads towards a climax at the Factory.

While we’ve been following the convergence of Angie and Molly and Mona in New York, things have hotted up at the Factory, namely bad guys have arrived. Using a loudhailer they demand the comatose body of Count Zero. Foolishly, Little Bird fires pretty much the only gun in the place at the tough mercs outside, at which point they announce they are going to storm the place.

The real world conflict is matched when Slick Henry jacks into Count Zero’s mind and discovers all kinds of wonders. Bobby’s consciousness exists in a tranquil paradise while he explores the mysteries of the new artifact in cyberspace. When Henry explains the situation, Bobby uses his control of cyberspace to reroute a passing automated cargo helicopter and make it drop its heavy loads onto the hovercraft and men approaching from outside.

Nonetheless, the mercs are just starting to fight their way into the Factory when out of nowhere the hovercraft driven by Molly erupts through the Factory walls. What follows next is largely seen through the eyes of 16-year-old Molly, who has found a stash of drugs and taken some, with the result that most of it is described in a stoned, dreamy, half-understood way.

Molly fights off the mercenaries aided by Slick Henry’s sculptures which, although they were built for his own psychological therapy, also happen to contain flame throwers and lasers and clutching claws and so on, all of which turn out to be handy in fighting off an attacking force of mercenaries.

While all this is going on, Angie makes her way up to the high-level ‘loft’ where Bobby’s stretcher is laid out and there, amid Slick Henry and Cherry, she embraces him. During the fight his weak body has finally expired. Angie puts on a spare set of ‘trodes, embraces his body, and she too disappears into cyberspace. Her body too expires, but we follow her into cyberspace where she imagines she is walking, being guided towards a wedding.

Back in the real world Molly has finished wiping out the mercs just as Angie’s boss, head of the Sense/Net simstim broadcasts, Hilton Swift arrives. His people had realised Angie had been kidnapped back at the hotel, identified the hovercraft she’d been driven off in, and it’s taken them this long to follow Angie out to the Factory.

Now Hilton and his people walk in at more or less the same time that Molly’s battered old hovercraft screeches off through a big gap in the Factory wall, taking with her Slick Henry and Cherry, who have forged some kind of bond in these last few hectic hours.

Tying up loose ends

As Hilton walks into the Factory he is confronted by just stoned Mona who, of course, is the spitting image of Angie, albeit twenty years younger. Entranced, Hilton and Porphyre (Angie’s minder) decide on the spot they will simply replace the dead Angie with Mona.

And so, after some extensive physical cleaning up and neural cleansing, it does indeed come to pass that Mona steps straight into Angie’s simstim shoes – and is even more of a hit than the original, returning to the world’s simstim screens new and refreshed after her detox break.

It had been explained, sort of, that Molly fled London and Swain because she had cut her own deal with (I think) 3Jane: this is what motivated her to bring Angie to the Count in his dying moments (though exactly why 3Jane wanted this to happen, I don’t understand). Anyway, in return for keeping her side of the bargain, all Molly’s criminal records are wiped clean, and she is a free woman.

It is confirmed that Swain, supposedly working for Kumiko’s dad, had in fact double-crossed him by selling out to 3Jane, partly due to her threat to expose all his criminal activities. But right at the end of the book we learn that Swain has been killed and replaced by the burly, crop-haired and rather fatherly Petal. Tick and Petal had taken a video call from Kumiko’s father explaining that the ‘difficulty’ he had been experiencing is now over. When Kumiko asks her father about his role in her mother’s suicide, he shows genuine remorse and repentance and Kumiko finds herself forgiving him. At which point there’s a knock on the door of Tick’s crappy flat and it is Petal who – to my relief – doesn’t just machine gun everyone inside – as happens in so many Yank movies – but instead kindly explains the situation and says he is taking Kumiko back into his guardianship under instructions from her father. Aaah.

The ‘other’

Despite rereading the ending I never understood why 3Jane’s dreams or thoughts appeared with such pressure and urgency to Angie. What I did understand is that all’s well that ends well.

Virtual Angie and virtual Bobby are shown living in a wonderful, luxury and very peaceful French chateau which he has constructed in cyberspace. Fragments of other minds drift in and out – tentative sad 3Jane, other players they’ve known such as Colin the smooth-talking cyber-guardian of Kumiko back in the early chapters, and in particular the foul-mouthed Finn, a character who has appeared in all the novels as a particularly wise and ancient cyber cowboy.

And then, one day, a limousine turns up and Bobby and the Finn, with Colin in attendance, lead Angie out and into it. They explain that on that day, 14 years earlier, when the matrix became one, it immediately sensed the presence of an ‘other’. Now they are taking her to meet that other. But cyberspace contains all human data, Angie protests. Sure, replies the Finn. But the ‘other’ isn’t human.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘If cyberspace consists of the sum total of data in the human system…’
‘Yeah,’ the Finn said, turning out onto the long straight empty highway ahead, ‘but nobody’s talking human, see?’
‘the other one was somewhere else,’ Bobby said.
‘Centauri,’ said Colin.
Can they be teasing? Is this some joke of Bobby’s?
‘So it’s kinda hard to explain why the matrix split up into all those hoodoos ‘n’ shit, when it met this other one,’ said the Finn, ‘but when we get there, yo’ll sorta get the feeling…’
‘My own feeling,’ said Colin, ‘is that it’s all so much more amusing this way…’
‘Are you telling the truth?’
‘Be there in a New York minute,’ said the Finn, ‘no shit.’

So a) it ends as many sci fi stories do, on the brink of the first encounter with intelligent life from another world b) I’m glad to see that even right at the end, there is no rational explanation for the One created at the end of Neuromancer is then discovered to have relapsed back into many fragments in the subsequent books, and not only that, but fragments which take the identities of voodoo gods.

Even right at the end where everything else is explained, this remains unexplained.

Other William Gibson reviews

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by Simon on March 19, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Science Fiction

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Posted by Simon on March 19, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/19/mona-lisa-overdrive-william-gibson/

Count Zero by William Gibson (1986)

He drank off the black bitter coffee. It seemed to him, just for a second, that he could feel the whole Sprawl breathing, and its breath was old and sick and tired, all up and down the stations from Boston to Atlanta…’
(Count Zero page 286)

The setting

This is the second novel in what came to be known as Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy (because there ended up being three of them: his debut, Neuromancer, and the third novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive.)

It is the future. Vast urban sprawls cover half of America, housing estates and huge malls under enormous geodesic domes blocking out the sky. Japanese culture and cuisine is widespread and everyone uses the New Yen as currency. Computers and digital technology, chips and disks, fuel a digital economy. Oil appears to have run out – possibly because Russia took control of the global supply after a brief war which America and the West lost – to be replaced by hydrogen cells. Electricity is generated by the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority whose well-protected gleaming towers of data can be seen by hackers in cyberspace. The real power in the world lies with vast multinational corporations known as zaibatsus. At the other end of the food chain, down on the littered streets, cheap bars and derelict spaces are full of veterans from the war, damaged physically or psychologically, many of whom turn up as protagonists in the Sprawl novels and in some of the Sprawl-related short stories collected in Burning Chrome (1986) published at the same time as the novels.

‘Sprawltown’s a twisty place, my man.Things are seldom what they seem.’ (Lucas, p.205)

This setting – ‘the street’ – is characterised by two things:

a Raymond Chandler film noir sensibility in which the world is entirely made up of crime and gangs – especially the terrifying Yakuza gangs
drugs, lots of drugs, everyone is on one type of drug or another, the hero of Neuromancer is off his face a lot of the time, and the drugs range from cheap street drugs like amphetamine (known on the street as ‘wiz’) to new, biochemically-engineered mind-enhancing substances (like ‘the most expensive designer drugs’ which the character named The Wig devotes himself to taking, p.173)

The result is a prose style which combines the basic mood of a thriller – the permanent edginess of protagonists on the run from threatening crime lords or criminal organisations or the cops or someone – but soaked in slangy, hip, knowing references to the ho-tech, drug-soaked, street gang components of this louche futureworld.

The feel

All that said, Count Zero immediately feels much broader and lighter than Neuromancer. That debut novel was set mostly at night, in often claustrophobic settings, bars, clubs, hotel rooms, dingy back alleys. Also the prose was extremely dense, studded with references to arcane technology or drugs or street gangs. There was barely a run-of-the-mill sentence in the whole book.

Count Zero is much more relaxed and diffused in several ways: its prose style is a lot less hectic – there are plenty of straightforward, factual sentences in it – but also the settings are more varied, and some of them even take place in daylight!

In fact whereas Neuromancer stuck pretty closely to the adventures of its computer hacker hero, Case, Count Zero is a complicated and canny weaving together of what start out as several completely distinct plotlines, featuring completely freestanding characters. Only as the story progresses do we slowly discover how they are linked.

Turner

Turner is an experienced kidnapper of top scientists. In the future this is a recognised profession. The huge scientific multinational corporations which control the world are prepared to pay kidnappers like Turner to poach the star scientists of the rival corporations.

‘You took Chauvet from IBM for Mitsu and they say you took Semenov out of Tomsky.’ (0.68)

Turner is – like the protagonist of every thriller ever written – an outsider, a rebel, the man who doesn’t fit in. Oh how we all wish we could be like him!

Turner himself was incapable of meshing with the intensely tribal world of the zaibatsumen, the lifers. He was a permanent outsider, a rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of intercorporate politics. (p.128)

‘A rogue factor adrift on the secret seas of intercorporate politics’ – cool!

Strikingly, the novel opens with a chapter describing how Turner was blown to pieces by an assassin’s bomb in India, and expensively fitted back together using future technology bythe clients who find him useful. Recuperating in Mexico, he hooks up with a pretty woman he meets in a bar and they have an idyllic romance, with sex on the beach, and sex in the bedroom.

Then – as with half the protagonists in the Burning Chrome stories and in Neuromancer – she walks away, leaving him devastated.

Turns out she was a therapist hired by the client to get Turner back into shape. The client now shows up and tells him this. Turner, super-tough guy that he is, accepts it without a flicker. (This opening reminded me of the idyllic Third World setting at the start of the second Jason Bourne movie, where Jason and his true love are enjoying idyllic times in a beach-front shack in India, till she is killed by mistake by an assassin sent to terminate Jason.)

These are rock solid, straight down-the-line, Hollywood-level, tough guy thriller clichés, and you can see the appeal.

Every timid, shy, boring salaryman and commuter (like myself) thrills to the adventures of people like Turner – young (he is 24, p.131), super-fit, super-alert, super-trained, no-nonsense, super-brave, possessor of ‘a ropey, muscular poise’ (p.129): faces down men bigger and harder than him, immediately wins over the tough bitch in the team, wow, what a man! (it was, apparently, in a review of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service published in the Sunday Times in 1963 that the critic Raymond Mortimer wrote, ‘James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets.’ Nothing has changed in 56 years.)
And yet, just as predictably, it turns out this tough guy has a heart of soppy mush — for the right woman he can be a perfect gent, picnics on the beach and cunnilingus in the bedroom. What a guy!

We follow as Turner is hired for a new job by his former partner, Conroy. He is to be in charge of setting up a base in the desert with a ragtag bunch of fellow mercs, ready to receive the absconding scientist, Christopher Mitchell, who will be escaping from Maas Biolabs’ high security research base in Arizona. Mitchell is a star science researcher who had developed the ‘hybridoma techniques’ on which much contemporary technology is based (p.127). A very important guy. the client is Hosaka Corp who want his brains and expertise. It’s a major assignment. You won’t be surprised to learn that things go disastrously wrong,

Marly

The Turner chapters are intercut with chapters following Marly Krushkhova, the pretty, rather naive ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’. She promoted a painting which turned out to be a forgery, so she was fired by the shareholders. Now she’s going for a job interview with a business owned by Josef Virek, rumoured to be the richest man in the world.

Marly is disconcerted to discover that Virek is not present in person, but that she is transported to a life-size hologram of a street in Barcelona, where she sits next to a hologram of him on a park bench and they chat.

In fact, the hologram tells her, the actual ‘Virek’ exists only as a disembodied brain kept alive in a vat in a him security compound in Stockholm.

He doesn’t want to hire her for some straightforward gallery job. Virek wants Marly to track down the artist who created a particular artwork which he once saw and was taken with – a Damian Hirst-style vivarium full of a random collection of detritus.

Virek will authorise money for her use to hire an apartment, planes, whatever she needs in her quest. ‘How long do I have?’ she asks. ‘The rest of your life,’ he replies. It takes a while for her to really understand that he is giving her an unlimited supply of money, over an unlimited period of time, to use all her contacts in the art world to track down the artist who made this one piece.

And, once she has staggered out of the hologram room to be met by Virek’s smooth-talking assistants and given the first instalment of money, she begins to realise that she is being followed and monitored at every step, not least by a suave Spanish man, Paco, who keeps appearing in the background whenever she meets contacts and begins her investigation.

This Quest will turn out to be the central driving force of the narrative, but the fact that Virek is so obscenely rich also gives Gibson plenty of opportunity to reflect on the nature of money, lots of money, super-money, and the effect it has on its owners and on those around them. In this futureworld where people routinely alter their consciousness either with mind-bending drugs or by encountering 3-D holograms or by entering the dizzying world of cyberspace, the rich can quite literally bend reality to their wishes.

‘The unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit…’ (p.27)

How could she have imagined that it would be possible to live, to move, in the unnatural field of Virek’s wealth without suffering distortion? Virek had taken her up, in all her misery, and had rotated her through the monstrous, invisible stresses of his money, and she had been changed. (p.107)

Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will… (p.2420

Count Zero

Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’, still lives with his mom in a crappy apartment in the vast area of cheap, high-rise housing known as Barrytown, New Jersey. He is an apprentice computer hacker, a cowboy of cyberspace, a ‘hotdogger’, hanging round the estate’s chrome-lined bars, trying to be fit in with the local gang members, but keenly aware that he is only a beginner with only a basic, entry-level hacker’s view of cyberspace.

He was like a kid who’d grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes of the ins and outs of weather. He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline. (p.62)

A local crime boss, Two-A-Day, hands Bobby a state-of-the-art console and asks him to hack into the financial records of some company. Things are going OK when Bobby suddenly experiences an enormous counter-surge of energy directed against him which stops his heart in the real world. Bobby starts to die, when some other undefined force leans in to cyberspace, releases him, and he regains consciousness on his mom’s carpet throwing up.

What the…?

He goes looking for Two-A-Day at the local crappy bar, Leon’s, where Gibson gives us florid descriptions of the drug-selling, computer-game-playing lowlifes. On the TV news he sees that his mum’s flat, indeed the entire row of apartments on that block, have been destroyed by a bomb. Christ! They’re after him.

Bobby goes and hides down a back alley by a dumpster which turns out be a bad idea because someone savagely mugs him. Whoever it is, slashes his chest open and also steals the console Two-A-Day gave him.

When Bobby comes round he is being sewn up using futuristic technology, and then delivered to Two-A-Day’s vast penthouse apartment where he meets a couple of soft-spoken, nattily-dressed and terrifying black men, Beauvoir and Lucas.

Beauvoir explains what’s happened: Two-A-Day had been given some new, high-powered anti-ice (ice being security software devised by corporations to protect their digital assets in cyberspace) program to by unnamed powerful agents. Unwilling to risk anything himself, Two-A-Day had sub-contracted the thing to Bobby – the idea being that, if it’s booby-trapped or dangerous it’ll only be worthless Bobby who gets wasted.

Well, something bad certainly happened to Bobby when he tried to use it. 1. Was that a failure of the program, or was it booby-trapped, or did it trigger a prepared defence mechanism in the corporation Bobby tried to hack?

But 2. and more importantly, whoever mugged him stole the console with the software inside. Now the very High-Ups who sub-contracted testing it to Two-A-Day are pissed off with him… and he is pissed off with Bobby, who needs to get it back.

Three mysteries

These are the three storylines which we follow in short, alternating chapters of Gibson’s over-heated, amphetamine-fuelled prose.

As the night came on, Turner found the edge again. It seemed like a long time since he’d been there, but when it clicked in, it was like he’d never left. It was that superhuman synchromesh flow that stimulants only approximated. (p.126)

All the characters hover on the edge of mind-altering psychotropic drug highs, or mind-expanding plug-ins to the dizzying landscape of cyberspace, or are involved in terror-inducing chases by cops or all-powerful threatening powers. With the result that the prose, and even more the plot, has you permanently on edge. It is a fantastically thrilling, gripping and exciting novel but which can also, partly because of the permanent obscurity Gibson maintains around some of the key motivators of the plot, become quite wearing and draining.

Basically, the narrative hangs around three cliffhanging challenges:

Will Turner’s handling of the defection of the high-level scientist work out as planned?
Who made the artwork that Virek hired Marly to track down, and why is Virek so obsessed by it?
Will Bobby ‘Count Zero’ manage to find the people who mugged him and stole his console, and what is the truth about the new super-program inside it?

Continuities with Neuromancer

I thought the book would be part of the Sprawl trilogy because set in the same futureworld, I hadn’t realised it would literally follow on from the first book, referencing many of the characters and incidents mentioned in Neuromancer and taking them further.

For example, you will remember that the climax of Neuromancer is set on a space station orbiting the earth, only much more than a space station, more like a miniature town set inside a vast offworld which rotates to give it gravity and includes luxury hotels, swimming pools and pleasure gardens. One whole end of this was sealed off and the home of the legendary Tessier-Ashpool family which are the richest in the world and built it.

The Quest in Neuromancer is that Case and the ferocious Molly Millions, she with the 4-centimetry retractable razor blades under each fingernail are hired to co-ordinate an attack on the heart of the Tessier-Ashpool stronghold – Molly has to kidnap the daughter of old man Ashpool, named 3Jane because the wicked old man has manufactured clones of his daughters, and drag her to a jewel-studded head, there to utter the codeword which activates it, at the same time as Case the hacker has hacked into the Tessier-Ashpool security system and disabled it.

Straightforward as this may sound the novel kind of crumbles or disintegrates into increasingly visionary prose as the goal of the Quest is reached and we learn, through welters of mystical-cum-hi-tech prose, that two separate artificial intelligences crafted by 3Jane’s mother, are, at the mention of the codeword, allowed to unite thus creating a sort of super-intelligence which, at that moment, becomes identical with all of cyberspace. In a sort of apocalyptic vision the matrix becomes self-aware, and although it doesn’t affect the material reality of humans out in the real world, it is a transformative event in the collective consensual hallucination of all the world’s data which we call ‘cyberspace’.

‘It’s just a tailored hallucination we all agree to have, cyberspace…’ (the Finn, p.170)

What happens in Count Zero is this story continues. It is seven years after the events of the first novel (p.177) and the sharp-dressed spades Bobby has met are privy to what’s happened to cyberspace since that seismic event, namely that the One has split into a variety of entities which share the names of traditional voodoo gods and goddesses. Yes, voodoo. The latter half of the book is coloured by what Beauvoir and Lucas tell Bobby about the presence in cyberspace of these gods who represent primeval forces, though it is very hard to understand whether they existed before cyberspace, since the dawn of time and have infiltrated it, or are entirely man-made constructions, or what.

‘Jackie is a mambo, a priestess, the horse of Danbala…Danbala rides her, Danbala Wedo, the snake. Other times she is the horse of Aida Wedo, his wife…’ (p.122)

Beauvoir brings Bobby to a bar, Jammer’s, on the 14th floor of a high-rise block in New York.

The most important event in the Turner plotline is that, when the ultralite arrives at the reception site prepared by Turner and the other mercs, it is carrying not Mitchell, but his teenage daughter Angie. Even as she arrives a ferocious firestorm breaks out, presumably Maas Biolabs’ security people having followed its course and now attacking. Turner unstraps the girl from the ultralite and runs with her to a small, high-powered, self-steering jet which takes off at terrific speed just as Turner watches the campment and all the mercs manning it – who we have spent half the book getting to know – vaporised in some kind of semi-nuclear blast.

Bloodied and half conscious Turner steers to plane to crash land near the ranch of his long lost brother, Rudy, and his partner, Sally. Here they fix up the girl, whose name is Angie and have a couple of scenes reminiscing about the old days, about mom and pa and huntin’ and fishin’ in the unspoilt countryside.

This is precisely the kind of low-key interlude you get in Hollywood thrillers, a break after an over-tense fight/crash/conflict sequence. Then it is time to load up into a spare hovercraft (yes, hovercraft are a popular form of transport in this futureworld) and head off, with a vague plan of hiding out in the Sprawl, the name given to the vast urban conurbation stretching from Boston to Florida.

Meanwhile Marly’s investigations keep turning up the name of Tessier-Ashpool and her quest leads her to buy a ticket to the off-world satellite, named Freeside – exactly the place where Neuromancer climaxed. Now, though, the entire section of the satellite which contained the Tessier-Ashpool compound has been hacked off and set into a separate orbit.

Here Marly discovers a mad old cyberhacker, Wigan Ludgate known as The Wig hiding out, guarded by a young crook on the run, Jones (‘me, I came here runnin” p.274) – both of them protective of the core of the complex which is a vast space in which great clusters of waste objects and detritus float in zero gravity. ‘The dome of the Boxmaker’ (p.312)

Attached to a wall is a multi-armed computer-driven robot which uses its arms to grab passing flotsam, cut and shape them with a laser, and then place them in vivariums. This is the robotic creator of the work of art which so entranced Virek.

But along the way, being sent messages from Virek in cyberspace, when she jacks into simstim, by couriers and agents, she’s slowly come to realise that the artist is in danger. Virek doesn’t just want an art work. And now, here in this gravityless dome, a screen flickers into life and his face appears, explaining.

He explains that for some time he’s known that a Christopher Mitchell working at Maas Biolabs has been fed information from some source in cyberspace, this being the real source of Mitchell’s astonishing tech breakthroughs. And his numerous agents and researches have led him to believe that the source of this information, the superbrain behind it, also made the vitrines he set her to track down. Now she has found the source, and is agents, having followed her all the way, are at the doors of the Tessier-Ashpool satellite.

Meanwhile, in the Jammers bar in New York, Bobby and his minder Beauvoir are joined by Angie and Turner. On his long journey – interspersed by attacks from various unnamed opponents (Maas? Hosaka? Conroy?) – Turner has had plenty of opportunity to learn that Angie’s brain has been laced with some kind of physical entity (‘a biosoft modification has been inserted in his daughter’s brain’). This may or may not explain her ability to see visions. While asleep she dreams of voodoo gods and talks to them and, sometimes, they speak through her mouth, as one possessed. At one point she retales to Turner the events at the climax of Neuromancer which we recognise though mean nothing to him.

By the time Turner and Angie meet up with Beauvoir and Bobby in the New York bar, all these characters have had quite a few conversations about what is going on in cyberspace, what the voodoo gods represent, and how they’re linked to the events in the Tessier-Ashpool offworld compound (which, of course, most of them only know about from confused rumour).

The result, for the reader, is to be in a state of sort of permanently confused tension. Turner is chased and attacked, the girl Angie has premonitions of disaster, Bobby is mugged and then on the run from Two-A-Day and whoever his bosses are, the New York nightclub is surrounded by threatening mobs who are under someone’s control, when they open the door laser guns are fired through it.

Only right at the end is Turner contacted by the man who hired him, Conroy, who explains at least part of the plot. According to him, Josef Virek, the world’s richest man, has heard about a new form of biosoft developed by Mitchell and his investigators were all over Mitchell’s attempt to escape Maas. But when he sent his daughter out instead – her head actually laced with the new biosoft invention) Maas’s own men pursued Turner and Angie, observed by Virek’s men, and complicated by the fact the corporation who was paying for Mitchell to be extracted, Hosaka, thought they’d been double crossed and were also tracking Turner.

By the end of the book I think that one of Beauvoir’s speculations may be close to the truth, that The One created at the end of Neuromancer has, for reasons unknown, split into multiple lesser entities and that these, having ranged through all mankind’s systems of signs and symbols, have settled on the voodoo gods as appropriate interfaces with mankind that humans will understand. The least incomprehensible, anyway.

In Jammer’s Bobby jacks into the matrix to find out why the club is surrounded and how to get rid of the mob and the attackers, when a series of things happens. He is sucked into a powerful programme and suddenly is sitting in the same park on the same bench next to Josef Virek as Marly had early in the novel. But the women he jacked in with, one of Beauvoir’s black associates, was killed almost immediately. Virek has no idea who Bobby is and orders his sidekick, Paco to shoot him but, just as Paco lines up a gun, another far bigger program and presence erupts out of the flower beds and chases Virek’s screaming figure down the path and obliterates him.

It is Baron Samedi, one of the voodoo presences and he is taking his revenge for one of their number being killed by a Virek programme. In his vat in Stockholm Virek’s life support fails. He is dead with the result that a) up in the dome of the Boxmaker his face suddenly disappears from the screen where Marly had been listening to his orders and b) outside Jammer’s the assassins and mercs who had assembled to grab Angie – which was the goal of them surrounding the place – are abruptly called off.

Conroy, the menacing merc who had hired Turner for the extraction job and who appears on a videocall right at the end explaining to Turner the combination of forces who’ve been pursuing him, well in the attack on the merc’s camp back at the moment when Angie’s ultralight touched down and which killed all the other mercs Turner had assembled – one of them (Ramirez) had a girlfriend, Jaylene Slide, a mean bitch who is plenty angry at Conroy.

‘I’m Slide,’ the figure said, hand on its hips. ‘Jaylene. You don’t fuck with me. Nobody in LA,’ and she gestured, a window suddenly snapped into existence behind her,’ fucks with me.’ (p.292)

Turns out she has been tracking him down to his current location in a hotel in New York, Park Avenue to be precise. And, as we and Turner are watching Conroy’s face on the screen, we hear her order her buddies to blow up the entire floor of the building where Conroy and his team are based. Conroy hesitates a moment and then there’s a loud bang then the picture flickers off.

Before being blown up Conroy had told Turner that Hosaka and Maas, the two giant corporations had reached a settlement about Mitchell’s death, a discreet payout with no publicity in the way of giant corporations.

And so, in the space of a few pages, all the baddies who have been chasing our heroes and fuelling the nail-biting narrative, disappear! Turner, Angie, Bobby – suddenly they’re all safe.

Loose ends

So once again, as in Neuromancer, the novel’s climax is an odd mix of the entirely worldly thriller element (Slide’s revenge against Conroy) and typical corporate cynicism (Maas and Hosaka making up) with a strangely mystical and difficult to understand element (the voodoo gods who destroy Virek). And I think that is a deliberate point – the point that the complexity of cyberspace has produced entities which are literally beyond human comprehension and with goals and aims of their own which interact and overlap with human motivations but are extra to them.

Anyway, most of the human characters survive and in a couple of pages at the end of the main narrative we are given a little of their subsequent careers. The teenager Angie, bloodied by some of her experiences, but unbowed, uses her access to the voodoo gods to establish a career as a simstim star for the global entertainment corp, Sense/Net.

If you remember, right back when Bobby jacked into Two-A-Day’s console and was being killed, it was she who stepped in to save him. Thereafter, for the rest of the book, they have a close psychic ink which neither can quite explain and becomes more important as Bobby jacks in in subsequent sequences. The upshot is that Angie hires Bobby as her ‘bodyguard’ in the new life she carves out for herself in California.

Marly returns to Paris unscathed by her adventures and ends up curating one of the largest art galleries in the city.

Turner returns to the ranch where he had briefly holed up with Rudy and Sally earlier in the book. It’s typical of the plot’s complexities that during those brief few days he managed to fall in love with Sally (his brother’s partner) and impregnate her (p.194). Rudy himself was, with the inevitability of a Hollywood thriller, killed by Turner’s pursuers when they tracked the crashed jet to their ranch – but they let Sally live and she gave birth to Turner’s child nine months later. He’s quit the kidnapping business.

But behind all this is the uneasy knowledge that the matrix of cyberspace has, apparently, become home to sentient beings, who take the shape of voodoo gods and can intervene in human affairs. Should we be worried? Is this all going to lead to some Terminator-style apocalypse? You have to read the third in the trilogy to find out.

P.S. the Finn

I should add that Beauvoir at one stage takes Count Zero to see the Finn, an outrageously foul-mouthed, dirty and senior hacker who, it turns out, was the man who passed on the dodgy console to Two-A-Day. It’s only right at the end of the book, and after reading the ending a couple of times, that I think I worked out that the console is one of many objects made by the machine in the Dome of the Boxmaker, which Wigan Ludgate, in his madness, sends off to an unnamed fence back on earth, who I think we are meant to deduce is the Finn. So the program inside the workaday-looking console is in fact an advanced product made by the voodoo AIs. And which explains why Angie, who is a separate creation of the voodoo AIs via her father, Mitchell, was able to lean into it when it began to overpower and kill the Count back in the early pages of the novel.

I mention all this a) because it ties up a loose thread, b) because it gives you a sense of the complexity – and the wacky characters – which the narrative delights in c) because the Finn will turn up in the next novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Credit

Count Zero by William Gibson was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in 1986. All references are to the 1993 Grafton paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

Burning Chrome by William Gibson (1986)

So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.
(Burning Chrome page 218)

Burning Chrome is a collection of ten short stories by William Gibson. They include his first published work, Fragments of a Hologram Rose, published in 1977, and then all the stories he wrote up till 1986.

In 1984 Gibson had published his debut novel, Neuromancer, set in a future world dominated by digital techologies, in which he made great use of the ideas of cyberspace and the matrix of digital information. What made it really distinctive, though, was how all this was viewed filtered through a film noir, street level culture which mixed the tough guy crime stories of Raymond Chandler with 1980s punk culture – in which this brave future was not supervised by Arthur C. Clarke-style, clean-suited technocrats, but was at the mercy of international corporations, Japanese yakuza gangs, ninja assassins, dealers selling all manner of futuristic drugs, holograms used for viewing savage knife fights or holoporn showing the obvious – in other words, a future seen from a street-level view of crime and rackets and dealers and pimps and whores, all summed up in the word, ‘the biz’. And all conveyed in an amphetamine-driven, drug-crazed, super-charged prose, dense with a dizzy combination of street slang and tech terms.

Neuromancer was followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive which, together, are now said to comprise Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy, so-called because in this America of the future, the entire East Coast has become one vast, continuous urban sprawl.

The stories in this collection include several which share the Sprawl world, including one which actually features the female protagonist from Neuromancer, Molly (and where we learn her surname is the rather cartoonish Million – Molly Millions).

And then there are ‘the rest’, a miscellany of non-Sprawl science fiction stories, most of them set in the future, or a future, just not necessarily the Sprawl future.

Sprawl stories

Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977) first published work

It’s very short (7 pages) and it is very fragmentary. We get the protagonist’s back story in scattered fragments. We have Hints of the Damaged Future, hints that Japanese business and culture was taking over America – the kit Parker uses to get into ASP is made by Japanese corporation, Sendai; more importantly, when a teenager his parents indenture him to a the US branch of a Japanese corporation, with its barracks and corporate hymns. He runs away. He flees to a California which has declared itself independent of the USA, under a chaotic ‘New Secessionist’ movement. Up to a point these can maybe be seen as extrapolations of trends Gibson saw in his own time.

The story already contains key themes, namely the protagonist, Parker, works on Apparent Sensory Perception (ASP) programmes. As in the Sprawl stories, you plug your brain into the player, play the tapes and you are there: the recording completely floods your sensorium.

And also, what I by now realise is another major theme, which is a surprisingly sentimental lost-love trope. The girls in Gibson (well, young women) are always slender as gazelles and tough as silicon razor nails. Sex is an olympic workout. His women can hold their own against gangsters and dealers. BUT, beneath this leather-jacketed veneer of modernity, the men are always loving and losing them, in a sentimental ‘I’m not going to cry’ tough guy way descended from Hemingway and Chandler.

Parker has woken at 3 in the morning (that’s another trope: it’s always the middle of the night, or the darkest hour before dawn) and is rummaging through her belongings and his memories. He finds the hologram of a rose which he unsentimentally flushes into the waste disposal unit. His last memory is watching her going off in a taxi leaving him standing there in the pouring rain. Sob.

Johnny Mnemonic (1981)

Super cool and fast moving, this concerns Johnny Mnemonic, so-named because memory banks (a hard drive) has been neurally inserted into his brain, so that he can store vast amounts of data which a) he doesn’t understand b) he cannot himself access.

The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.’ (p.22)

Only clients with the password can access it. He is a storage facility or, as he himself puts it: ‘a nice meatball chock-full of implants.’

As so often the story features a meeting with a drug dealer, Ralfi, in a lowlife café. The dealer has brought a neural disruptor so, although Johnny has packed a sawnoff shotgun in an adidas bag, he is paralysed, while the dealer indicates that the hired muscle he’s brought, Lewis, is going to hurt him.

Enter a typically lean, mean, streetwise chick, who identifies herself as Molly Millions (‘She was wearing leather jeans the colour of dried blood’) and, as Lewis leans forward to hurt Johnny, flips her hand past his, somehow lacerating his wrist down to the artery. Lewis clutches it and runs off. We later learn Molly has four-centimetre-long razor retractable blades installed under her fingernails. (She has also had her eyballs replaced with digital lenses.) The neural disruptor goes off and Johnny is free.

Molly grabs his hand and runs him along to her hiding place, a disused part of the lofty ceiling of a vast mall made of geodesic domes, overseen by an outlandish gang named the Lo Teks who dance and perform on a high-wire dance floor they call the Killing Floor.

In case this is all too mundane, Gibson throws in the participation of a cybernetic dolphin, a relic from the war (you know, that war) which is kept in a rundown zoo, but features, among its other hi-tech devices, a SQUID, being a Superconducting Quantum Interference Detector, which they use to extract the data in Johnny’s head which caused Ralfi to come after him. They reward the dolphin, whose rather dull name is Jones, by shooting him up with heroin, yes, this cybernetic dolphin is a junkie.

They use Jones’s skills to extract and place the data in a construct which they leave on a shelf in the backroom of a gift shop.

And here is another classic element of the Sprawl world: the power of multinational corporations, the real rulers of the world, controllers of entire economies, and that most of these multinational corporations are Japanese.

The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse. (p.22)

Burning Chrome (1982)

A seminal story for several reasons.

It has all the familiar ingredients: Automatic Jack and Bobby Quine are two ex-soldiers (fought at the Battle of Kiev in the same failed war against Russia mentioned in Neuromancer). Jack, the narrator, is injured/wounded – his arm was lasered off while flying a microlight. Future technology gives him a replacement cybernetic arm, powered by nerves.
There’s a sexy chick, Rikki, who within a sentence of appearing in the story, is pulling a ‘frayed khaki cotton shirt’ over her pert, twenty-something breasts. Jack falls in love with her, then loses her.
Jack and Bobby are criminals who hack into business information in cyberspace for gain.

In terms of storytelling technique, it is classic Gibson in the way it’s based in a ‘present’, after the bank job, the heist, the caper – in which the narrator a) looks back on everything that’s happened b) dwells on falling in love with the woman and losing her – and intersperses this with chunks of exposition, which tell the actual story i.e. how Jack and Bobby enter cyberspace to break into the highly defended vaults of ‘Chrome’, a terrifyingly violent criminal who launders money for organised crime, as well as running a bar-cum-brothel, the House of Blue Lights.

Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold grey eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. (p.196)

Same technique is used in New Rose Hotel, where the narrator is in a ‘present’, after a big criminal caper has taken place – looking back at both the build-up to the crime, and lamenting his abandonment by a sexy, feisty woman (Sandii). (She took the money and went off to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a ‘simstim’ star.)

But the most important aspect is that, by way of describing how Jack and Bobby steal all Chrome’s assets in cyberspace, it gives extended (and useful) explanations of key concepts in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe – cyberspace, the matrix and ice.

Bobby was a cowboy, and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing corporate data.

Towers and fields of it ranged in the colourless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they operate behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial-espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine.

And I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph in this sequence because it’s a classic example of how Gibson’s mastery of a certain type of speed-fuelled prose can turn what is, basically, the boring reality of criminals hacking into computers, into soaring prose poetry.

Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems. (p.197)

A bit later, the narrator tells us there are some 15 million legitimate console operators around the world, doing the daily trudgework of maintaining these vast castles of data. But we never meet them in Gibson’s stories. We only meet the lowlife, edgy, drug-fuelled hackers and hustlers.

On one level, Gibson is just the latest in a long line of American noir writers who make crime sound impossibly glamorous.

P.S.

Automatic Jack is referenced in the second of the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero. In that novel Bobby the hacker has ended up in the 14th-floor nightclub owned by a dude named Jammer, and can’t take his eyes of the man’s cool new cyberspace deck, so Jammer hands Bobby a set of trodes:

He stood up, grabbed the handles on either side of the black console, and spun it round so it faced Bobby. ‘Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Things ten years old and it’ll still wipe as son most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight from scratch. He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist once. The two of ’em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born…’ (Count Zero, p.230)

Pattern recognition

The characteristic protagonists are men, young men – 22, 24, 28.

They take drugs – amphetamine, cocaine, and a variety of invented future drugs such as ‘hype’. A lot of the characters hang out in bars and drink to excess.

Old or young, they are often damaged – like Korosov with his shattered body, or Automatic Jack with his prosthetic arm, or Tiny Montgomery stuck in his wheelchair, or Lise with some degenerative disease which requires her to be supported by an exoskeleton. Or psychologically damaged like the receivers Toby and Charmian, or Deke and Tiny, the war veterans.

Most of the stories feature a young woman, generally thin, great figure, great boobs, but able to hold her own on the street, epitomised by Molly with the razor nails, or the mystery alien woman in The Belonging Kind, Sandii, and Rikki.

Generally, the young, lowlife, criminal male protagonist carries a torch for this cyberbabe. Generally, she leaves and breaks his heart and he spends a lot of time raking over the reasons why. Some of the stories are written more or less as letters, directly addressing this woman, who leaves, dumps, drops the writer: e.g. Rikki at the end of Burning Chrome, or Sandii in New Rose Hotel, or Lise in The Winter Market.

The male protagonists are generally criminals, most often computer hackers – Jack and Bobby the hackers in Chrome, Johnny Mnemonic who runs off with someone else’s data, Deke the thief, the kidnapping (corporate extraction) experts in New Rose Hotel – and the stories recurrent focus is on lowlife, criminal milieus, gangs, drug dealers, ninjas, assassins, all written up in fabulously street-smart, tech-savvy, turbo-charged prose.

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Virtual Light by William Gibson (1993)

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Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (1988)

Kumiko

Angela Mitchell

Count Zero

Mona

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Tessier-Ashpool again

Tessier-Ashpool in Neuromancer

Tessier-Ashpool in Count Zero

Tessier-Ashpool in Mona Lisa Overdrive

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Count Zero by William Gibson (1986)

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Turner

Marly

Count Zero

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Burning Chrome by William Gibson (1986)

Sprawl stories

Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977) first published work

Johnny Mnemonic (1981)

Burning Chrome (1982)

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The Gernsback Continuum (1981)

The Belonging Kind (with John Shirley, 1981)

Hinterlands (1981)

Red Star, Winter Orbit (co-written with Bruce Sterling, 1983)

New Rose Hotel (1984)

The Winter Market (1986)

Dogfight (co-written with Michael Swanwick, 1985)

Pattern recognition

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