I wish I could’ve seen it when you blew up your television
—Baxter
So this review is going to be very spoilery so please just go read the book; start with other Gibson books (like Burning Chrome, which is referenced and spoiled here in Count Zero) before this one, though, unless you really want to jump in the deep end first.
This is the kind of book that makes me happy all day because I know I’m soon going to get to get back to reading it. Like “Lalala I’m washing the dishes and existence is pain but that’s okay because soon I’m gonna get to sit down for a few chapters of Count Zero so it’s a good day.”
Just iconic genre fun like a good super hero comic. Yeah, yeah, there are issues of Spider-Man that are like truly profound but I wouldn’t be reading Spidey if it weren’t for how just the average day of swinging webs and hanging out with Felicia and Jonah is just inherently fun.
Count Zero is the second book in the Sprawl trilogy but some of the short stories in Burning Chrome is also set in that world and my reco would be to start there. The Sprawl books were notoriously dense with its own lingo of slang and brand names, both of them both real and made up, and had a reputation of being hard to understand back in the day.
Maybe that reputation wasn’t entirely unearned because just look at how much the back copy of my edition got wrong. Even the publisher’s apparently didn’t really know what they had on their hands. Buckle up for spoilers for the first several chapters:
Hallucination by consensus
Okay, maybe that’s fine, an imporvement even. The line in the book is “consensual hallucination” as a sort of Stanisław Lem–like metaphor for the internet in a book that came out six years after Usenet and the same year that IETF was founded. (Hold on, I shouldn’t be so 1986 about it because Burning Chrome was 1981 and that’s where a lot of the themes were already established.)
When the Angels pulled Count Zeor out of the matrix there wasn’t much left of him. The centipede did a good job on his face though—and now Two-a-Day was going to let him in on the really big stuff…
He gets pulled out of the matrix by someone else, which is one of the mysteries the book gradually reveals—and that’s part of why I love Gibson’s books so much; the framework is super weird but it’s not the tension driver, there are always real and clear stakes and mysteries. Sometimes cheap McGuffin’s like the clip in Pattern Recognition or the goggles in Virtual Light or the boxes, job, and mysterious saviour here, but it works.
Then he gets cut up IRL by some gangers and that state of being bleeding out on the pavement is what the Angels (Rhea and Jackie) pull him out of. Much to the consternation of Two-a-Day; it’s not him that’s “letting” Count Zero in on anything voluntarily.
And the centipede fixes up Count Zero’s back and chest, not face.
Unlike Turner:
Turner woke up in a new body with a beautiful woman beside him. They let him recuperate for a while in Mexico, then Hosaka reactivated his memory for the most dangerous mission of all: to make Mitchell defect from Maas Biolabs…
Yep, he more or less does get a new body but then he decides on his own to go to Mexico and he meets Allison there. And while she’s beautiful, the limited third person narration (yeah I know…) makes a point of how she isn’t the cookie-cutter model type he’s usually been hooking up with. And while it’s a surprise reveal late first chapter that she’s a field psych on retainer for Hosaka, Turner isn’t shown to have had his memory “inactive”. They show up and bring him in for a job; not to “make” (convince) Mitchell to defect, but to bring him in safely since he is trying to defect.
It seemed that the rich had long ceased to be recognisably human. Like Virek, whose body was suspendend in a vat somewhere while his hologram told Marly that he wanted her to find some Art Works for him. And that she was on the payroll for life…
(CW body horror for this part.) Suspended less like a person floating in a bacta tank and more like how a sugar cube is “suspended” in hot coffee cell by cell.
The capitalization of “Art Works” is def on this back copy writer and what Virek wants is the artist that made them. Marly’s only on payroll for that one mission. “On the payroll for life” sounds so ominous but when reading the book (I read the book before I read the back copy, which I always waint until last, since some books, like Vian’s L’Automne à Pékin, spoil the entire ending on the back copy, which I think is bad practice but unfortunately common enough. Yeah, yeah, this review is pretty spoileriffic too but my reviews aren’t as much meant as pre-reading consumer guidance as they are, uh, ways for me to reflect on what I’ve read and what I like and don’t like about it, and what writers can learn from it) I actually thought “wait she’s on all-expenses-paid on very expensive and luxurious mission but what about her own future after the mission is done? Does she get salary or a reward fee or something?”
Also (but this is a nitpick among nitpicks) in the novel’s setting, holograms (which project into IRL, for ads or religious iconography or porn) are distinct from the type of brain-local simstim Virek appears through.
In the matrix of cyberspace—where zaibatsus fought it out for world domination and the computer jocks risked their minds scuffling for fat crumbs—the lives of three human beigs were inextricably scrambled.
Okay, this was the last paragraph of the back copy and it’s pretty accurate. No notes. I love the redudancy of “in the matrix of cyberspace” so much. It’s actually weird to me how in the novel, cyberspace a.k.a. the matrix (both terms are used interchangeably) is simultaneously this vast giga space of a bajillion users, while also being something that only hotdoggers and cowboys can go on (at one point Count Zero gets hold up three hours in customs just for the audacity of having a means to go online with), while also being explicitly geographic. You need to literally fly around in there in some low-rez Vectrex game with electrodes on your head. You can’t just type in alt.cyberpunk and teleport there. And that ginormous world is so small so you might accidentally end up in LA when you’re heading to Japan and you always run into people you know on there like elephants in a phonebooth.
Another indication that this book might’ve been more than the publisher could handle was that there are a lot of small errors (in my 1987 paperback copy) like a “two” that should’ve been a “too”, a “however” that became a “whoever”, inconsistent capitalization, and things like that that would’ve slipped through a spellcheck and an overwhelmed, zonked-out, future-shocked editor. This book must’ve been a mind bomb for ‘em!
it’s sounds like I’m making fun of the book and I am a little—I can’t help it, it’s so fun, this world of broadcast simstim, telefaxes, newsloops, music cassettes, and mono-molecule everything, written in an era before CDs and Netscape, but there’s really a lot to seriously like here, too. Everyone’s in a while you find these fun anachronisms (which Gibson himself caricatured with such precision in The Gernsback Continuum), postcards from a world that could’ve been but wasn’t, but that’s not the brunt of the text.
Okay, yeah, references are the brunt of the text but they’re of four kinds:
So while yes, the main “plot” of the novel is a distant second to cramming in a zillion references a minute, but those references ar e a delight because only a tiny li’l mini fraction of them are in that fourth “wrong guess” category (and they’re much more fun than they are annoying). Gibson didn’t set out to only be a futurologist. This is a novel, and it does work as novel with great character work and real tension drivers, and it also works as poetry with these dense sentences in a language all his own.
There’s only a few crumbs that get stuck like how Jackie has decorated her hair with antique resistors; beats like that come across as a fetishization of tech that’s uncharacteristic of the rest of the novel.
The latter Pattern Recognition (one of my favorite books of all time) is in many ways a remake of the Marly section of Count Zero. Excentric curator gets sponsored by even excentricer ultra rich but problematic guy to find anonymous creator of tightly curated art where the journey is more interesting than the destination. Not that either book is a shaggy-dog exactly; there is an interesting-enough pot of gold at the end of these rainbows but in both cases, the real treasure is the friends we made along the way. (And I need to go on AO3 to search for Marly/Rez ship fics.)
In the case of Count Zero, that might be underselling it a little because I really did think that was a beautiful and curious and interesting revelation scene for the artist at work, marred a little by (spoiler for dumb ending detail but it’s not the whole thing) Virek’s completely misguided attempt to somehow upload into a computer.
I also almost never get bugged by characters making mistakes like I’m not the one to shout “nooo don’t go into the basement” when watching a horror movie because usually I’m myself slow-witted enough to be three steps behind the movie characters so I never think of realizing that they’re making mistakes, so it’s a rare exception that here I felt that Marly’s policy of not reading the provided reports because they might “interfere with my intuition” got annoying after that policy had blown up for the second time and it kept blowing up a couple of more times after that until it through a couple of ex machinas stopped blowing up. I was like “okay yeah you’ve learned by now that those reports have some pretty vital info so read them now please”. I get that the policy from an authorial standpoint was great because it made us get the highlights as infodumps from side characters instead of like how in Rice’s latter The Witching Hour there’s “read this report please” followed by a couple of hundred pages of the actual report that the reader has to slog through, so I’m glad Gibson tried something else here, but it started putting a starin on both the story’s credibility and Marly’s likeability.
One of my old IRL friends had an unusual hacker handle back in the day and now I finally know where it came from; from this book! (I’m being vague since I haven’t talked to them since the 90s but if that person is reading this I hope they feel free to email me.) I’m 90% sure. Coincidences happen; I had a laptop that I hostnamed “slowstorm” and the phrase “slow storm” does appear in this book in a particularly poetic section but that’s not where I got it from.
Conclusion: a banger book that I absolutely loved and will probably reread many times. My reco is, and I hope this doesn’t come across as gatekeeping because if you wanna dive in here you can, is to instead start with other Gibsons, like the Burning Chrome short tsory that’s featured in the collection of the same name, or books from the Bridge trilogy or the Blue Ant trilogy, but if you have, then this is another great one.