On Mona Lisa Overdrive

I can’t say I was entirely impressed by Mona Lisa Overdrive. There’s something the other books had that this one lacks, and I don’t think it’s the blitzing pace or the cyberspace runs — it’s the sense of wonder at the sheer enormity of the whole cyberspace project. The new characters also have nowhere near the swagger of the old ones. I know they embodied a specific, historically bound idea of “cool” — Case was bitter and angry and powerful; Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, was hands-down the coolest character in the trilogy; Molly Millions and Angie Mitchell are great too — but Mona, Kumiko, and the gang at the Factory? Not so much. The book leans heavily on fan service, with throwbacks to the first two and old characters returning, but without the fascinating change in what’s happening in cyberspace (the Voodoo AIs and all of that in Count Zero).

My edition includes a fascinating short essay by Gibson on having written the book knowing nothing about computing — that these stories aren’t really about digital technology but about what it means to live in an industrial, and post-industrial, world where humans and machines rapidly merge. Cyberpunk, as a genre, reflects our cyborg reality. That concluding essay gave me a greater appreciation of the whole trilogy, and I’m glad it was included.