On Count Zero

Count Zero is excellent — in many ways a better novel than Neuromancer, with intensity and pacing every bit as strong. What sets it apart is the style: it’s simply better written, even if it loses some of Neuromancer’s totalizing technological naturalism. The superintelligent AI, or capital, spares no victims, and it comes off here as far more Gothic than cybernetic, which is a fine rendering of it. My one want is more of Bobby Newmark — I feel he should be as central as Case was in the previous book.