Customer Reviews

Count Zero

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"Count Zero" pulls it off without being cheesey. I was surprised by how unstupid this futuristic setting was. I also thoroughly appreciate that Gibson does not write down to his audience... he acknowldeges our ability to understand the lingo and nuances of his future-world without having to explain it to us. His style is fresh and sharp.

The three main characters are flawed and written to be believable. There is little character development but that does not seem to be the point. It appears that the focus is more on us getting to know them- the real them. At first they are strangers and then they become more to the point where you HAVE to know that they will be ok in the end. Few authors have the capability to inspire such empathy. (My favorite part was when the Box Maker made a box for Marly.)

The story is capitvating. The pace moves along slowly at first and builds to a frenzy. Reading this book leaves you with the obvious impression that Gibson definately knew what he was doing when he wrote it. The story is a puzzle. You know that everything fits together somehow... but how exactly?

If you loved "The Matrix," take the time to read "Count Zero." You'll find similarities and you'll also find "Count Zero" to be a superior story. More sci-fi needs to be like this.

I loved Neuromancer and was happy to find that it was made into a sort of trilogy, but I was quite disappointed with Count Zero. I think it is a combination of the writing style, characters, and overall plot.

As part of a trilogy, it does not have all that much in common with Neuromancer other than the world it is set in. None of the main characters from Neuromancer appear except for the Finn but it's only a cameo appearance here. We get the impression that the Wintermute AI sort of split into multiple entities at some time between the stories, which is suggested to be a few years.

As for the characters, none of them really appealed to me the way the ones from Neuromancer did. The main protaganists are underdeveloped and rather bland at the end. They just weren't that sympathetic and I couldn't really get myself to care about them.

Then there is the writing style. While Neuromancer was written entirely from Case's point of view, Count Zero is seen through the eyes of three different people who take different paths throughout the story. At the end of the book the paths converge but they do so in a rather sudden and Deus-Ex-Machina like way that is hard to swallow. It felt to me like Gibson was running out of pages and had realized that he needed to tie all these plot threads together. The book could have used a couple more chapters to straighten everything out, rather than having the non-ending it has like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (a small flaw in an otherwise phenomenal book.) This writing style however, has become common in Gibson's later novels, though fortunately in Virtual Light he learns to tie the three characters together better and in Idoru he sticks to only two main protagonists, which makes it easier to follow.

Overall, I would only recommend reading Count Zero if you intend to read Mona Lisa Overdrive (final book in the trilogy) as it takes off shortly from the end of Count Zero with some of the same main characters and developes them more. In the big picture, Count Zero doesn't stand very well on it's own and mainly bridges the gap between the beginning and the end.

I have read this masterpiece (together with the other two of the Sprawl series: NEUROMANCER and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE) during my university years, about a decade ago. Since then I have re-read it countless times.

Of the three this is my favorite: good and evil voodoo legbas as AI cyberspace avatars; life in the Sprawl comes into focus, sharply. The eye-watering smog and the ozone smell of new electronics surround a storyline that moves on deserted highways with the assurance of an armored hovercraft..

Even reading only some pages brings up powerful imagery, unforgettable prose...

Start with NEUROMANCER. Then this one. And then MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.

A Masterpiece Trilogy!!! Own them all!!!

I first read this book (many years and many rereads ago) with low expectations. I'd been told that Gibson was a one book wonder, that he'd never managed to pull off a second book nearly as good as his brilliant first novel, NEUROMANCER. Gibson beat that rap, of course, with masterpieces like IDORU and PATTERN RECOGNITION. But somehow COUNT ZERO has always gotten ever so slightly lost in the shuffle.

Well, I'm here to tell you that everyone, starting with Publishers Weekly, got it wrong. COUNT ZERO is no mere repeat of Neuromancer. It's a different beast altogether. It's older, subtler, and stranger. It's Neuromancer's hard-boiled street chic all grown up and with grown-up-sized problems. The characters are real, complex, and unforgettable. And the central image of the book - though I can't describe it without giving much of the plot away - generates one of the most hauntingly beautiful moments in all of science fiction.

If you're one of those Gibson fans who hasn't quite gotten around to reading COUNT ZERO, you're in for a rare treat.

"Count Zero" is an extremely good fiction novel. In fact, I thought it was even better than "Neuromancer" (also by Gibson). It is more concrete, and more easily understood, in it's concepts. Don't get me wrong, it's still got all the abstract ideas and goings ons that are in "Neuromancer". It's got all the action, all the technology, and all the wonderful characters. It wouldn't be a Gibson novel without them. They are quirky and fascinating at the same time. I think the characters are humanized a little more too. For all these reasons, I really liked the novel.

Don't skip "Neuromancer" due to this though. You'll enjoy "Count Zero" even if you haven't read "Neuromancer" yet. They are both good novels and deserve to be read in order. Plus "Count Zero" brings in little snippets from "Neuromancer". I can't wait to start on "Mona Lisa Overdrive", the next in the series.

As a avid reader of cyberpunk, i can say with all confidence that this is one of the most entertaining cyberpunk novels I have had the priviledge of reading. William Gibson takes three seemingly unrelated stories, and blended them together in a wonderful story that grabs you by the throat and takes you on a high speed journey through Gibson's bleak world of the future. Whether it be the story of Turner, the corporate bodyguard for hire, Bobby, the budding cyberspace cowboy, or Marly, the down on her luck art critic, all the characters in the novel are well developed and each with their own personalities. The only real problem I had with this book was the ending, which was rather abrupt and left this reader wanted more. All in all, it is an excellent, well-written novel. William Gibson does it again.

I'll make it short and sweet. Of the neuromancer series, this on was the best.

With Neuromancer, Gibson exploded onto the science fiction stage with his imagined future of Japanese hegemony, cyperspace cowboys and sentient computers. With Count Zero, he takes that world, revisits and expands on it.

He seems to have grown more confident as a stylist with this book. The prose is so baroque, each page so dense with ideas and textures, that it takes one's breath away. Gibson himself admits in interviews that fear of boring his reader makes him boil down his prose to bare essentials. We get where things are made, textures of materials not invented yet, cityscapes filled with superskyscrapers and Fuller domes, etc. And as always, his rock and roll Burroughs/Elmore Leonard prose is right there with us. Hyper-detailing, capturing the slang of the underworld cyber-criminals.

More ambitious in this outing, he takes on more characters and Dos Passos-like, spirals them all into a coalescent finale with a very assured hand. A tight, incredibly imaginative and detailed book - that will go by like the wind.

I actually like Count Zero far better than either Neuromancer or Mono Lisa Overdrive, the two books that bookend it in the seminal cyberpunk trilogy. The opening scene is a killer, of course (in more ways than one), and there is just so much lovely writing in here ("A chunk of memory detached itself from the ceiling and fell on him"). The characters are more sympathetic than the ultra-cool testosterone cowboys of Neuromancer or the sad, broken people of Overdrive. The plot, or plots, is intricate and surprising.
I love this book. I'm torn about recommending it without recommending Neuromancer and Overdrive. My advice would be to read them all, in order. I bet you'll prefer this one in the end.

Of the three "sprawl" books. Very detailed, excellent plotting and charatures. If you are a Steely Dan fan, play spot the song references, there are at least 6. Truly if you are a cyberpunk fan should buy all 3; Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. If you are into well written SF, by them anyway, and trust me, you'll be a cyberpunk fan at the end.