★★★★★ A Cyberspace Cowboy

Count Zero

William Gibson

Count Zero was the first book in William Gibson's Cyberspace trilogy I read. I picked it up in an airport bookstore, where it was on display, so it was probably pretty newly published -- let's say 1984. The Internet existed -- I had been using it to send email, although that was still pretty difficult and took some figgerin. It would be another ten years before Tim Berners-Lee's World-Wide Web got off the ground as a thing that any academic could use, and thus a version of Gibson's cyberspace became real. There were no eBooks back them (not really), which meant that a person like me, who must ALWAYS have a book to read, had to carry a backpack full of heavy paper books when I traveled. A quick glance in the bookstore made it clear that Count Zero was my kind of book. And it was.

As it happens, the series works almost equally well in the order Count Zero, Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive as the canonical order. Sally is the only major character who runs through the entire series, even including Burning Chrome. (Well, perhaps also The Finn, but his "major" status is debatable.)

Although there are several point-of-view characters, I always think of Count Zero as Bobby's book, and -- let's be fair -- the title Count Zero is Bobby's handle, so that's not unreasonable. In each book of the Cyberspace trilogy point of view cycles through a cast of four or five characters. This was the first book like that that I remember to have read, and it was a little disorienting, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Bobby is a teenage kid who wants to become a cyberspace cowboy. You can probably guess roughly what that means. The other point-of-view characters are also marginal criminal low-lifes.

They are the natural denizens of a dystopian future, in which capitalism run riot has made a Hell of the world for almost everyone. No, not like the world we live in now, but as if everything that was going wrong in 1984 continued to get worse and worse with higher and higher tech -- the rich get richer and the poor get much, much poorer. Everything is a scam and everyone is on the take. It's very much in the "if this goes on" science fiction tradition.

Three spectacularly good novels -- prophetic in some ways, but not (as yet) in others.

Count Zero on Amazon

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