'Count Zero' by William Gibson

Count Zero, William Gibson (3)

Until I stumbled (literally) across this book at a used bookstore, I had not realized that it was the follow-on to Gibson’s famous ‘Neuromancer’. For those unfamiliar, Gibson is credited with creating cyber-punk, the first to use the phrase cyberspace and even as the predictor of the World Wide Web. Given that he wrote short stories and these novels about plugging into a computer structure, where a whole world connected in the early 80’s, the credit seems due. This story follows 3 protagonists who are each disparately involved in a new, possibly destructive biochip (think of a virus in software that is almost a biological virus too when put into your anatomical ‘jack’ used to access the computer world). Given all the various difficult concepts – which, since written in 1987 don’t necessarily use words that eventually came to be – this book is not easy to read. I muscled through it and found it interesting and worth reading for the historical implications alone. It definitely whetted my appetite, now I have put ‘Neuromancer’ and ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive’ back on my to-reread list.