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

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

The cover of my edition quotes a newspaper review as saying that Gibson is 'the Raymond Chandler of SF', and I would have to concur - both authors weave impossibly involved plots, but the stories are told so well that it hardly matters! The real joy of reading Gibson is the journey, and the wonderful way he uses language and imagination to craft a universe that is a unique blend of now (or the 1980s, at least) and the technology of the future. The characters in this sequel lack the personality and focus of the first book, but it's just as easy and entertaining to be drawn into their world. ( )

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

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

We'll see how Mona Lisa Overdrive turns out. ( )

Several years after reading it, I find that little of Count Zero has remained with me -- except for a feeling of disappointment that it seemed to be a second-rate rehash of Neuromancer's best ideas and themes. It wasn't bad enough to put me off reading other Gibson novels, some of which I've enjoyed immensely. ( )

I feel like I've read the Sprawl series as a set of flashbacks. I started with the most recent, Mona Lisa Overdrive, slammed all the way back to Nueromancer, and then wound up filling in the final blanks in the middle. I don't know if it's because I have all the pieces now or just the way this one was put together, but Count Zero is my favorite of the three. (The only big flaw being the complete lack of Molly).

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

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

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

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