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

Not Free SF Reader: Retrieval, via mercenary and loser.


Another good cyberpunk novel by Gibson, throwing another whole pile of stuff at you that you see other authors echo later, like Walter Jon Williams, or Richard Morgan, for the voodoo elements in virtuality.

The corporations here are nasty, and if they decide to deal with you, they hire guys like one of the protagonist warriors in this book, preferably without them knowing what is going on given they have woken up in a new body.

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. ( )