meandering with bright points but short on ideas, 10 Nov 2008
This book meanders about. Majority of the book is 3 separate stories that link at the end - but the stories are mixed up so a challenge to track whats actually going on. If you take a couple of weeks to get through, then this bouncing between plots is confusing & irritating.

As to the rather shallow plot (or plots), we all know that this book is REALLY about techy what-if cyberspace stuff - the plot is just a platform for Gibson to exhibit & expound his concepts & imagination. I cant help feeling that the author was a bit tired & short on ideas when he wrote this one.

The dark atmosphere is well created. Namedropping of designer brands is tiresome & begins to grate. I do actually know about Stark furniture so can appreciate these touches - but the continual reference to brands of phone / shoe / hotel / coat / sunglasses etc really alienates me!

If you are a loyal follower of Gibson (as most reviewers seem to be) you wont be dissapointed. It still is a good read - and certainly improves when the plots come together in the last chapter, but its not his best.

Give it up Bill, 22 Sep 2008
The grand old man of that dead genre: Cyberpunk (which was neither punk nor spectacularly technologically savvy, unlike say, Neal Stephenson) is back to bore us rigid. A shaggy dog story which goes absolutely nowhere. While Gibson's old narrative trick (and let's face it, he only has one) - to take three narrative threads and alternate them by chapter until in some hopeless contrivance they all join together at the end - works quite nicely, the tedious techno porn (everything has a matte black or grey surface) and the barely beleivable characters (pesky things in Gibson's sad world) just drag the whole thing down.
The ending is basically a total let-down. Since Mona Lisa Overdrive this guy's stuff has got more and more derivative and lame.
It's modern life as viewed by someone who's too rich, too lazy and too self-regarding to really have any literary merit whatsoever.
Avoid.

Go back to the future, William Gibson!, 10 Sep 2008
This is William Gibson's first novel set explicitly in the proper present, so it lacks that sense of exploring the near future which so haunts all his other books. For me this meant that instead of letting myself get swept away into the story, I kept comparing Spook Country's events with what I know to be the case about the times in which I live.

Gibson has done the art world before - Neuromancer I think features a search for artworks by the real-life eccentric Joseph Cornell. This book switches uneasily between art and more serious intrigue... sometimes even uncomfortably.

But for me there was too much real life! I enjoyed all the stuff about the ex-rock band singer Hollis Henry, but every time there was a mention of Philip Starck hotels or Pete Townshend's nose or ... anything real, I just slightly cringed. I just wanted to go back to the world Gibson usually sites his books in, where everything is made up, and enjoying that fictionality and that level of imagination is one of the pleasures of reading.

There were even some things which I thought were mistakes. One tiny example that doesn't spoil the plot: there is a supposed Wikipedia entry on one of the characters, which Hollis reads. Seriously, NO wikipedia entry is that well-written. Really. Even the ones people write for themselves.

Having made my criticisms, what I will say about William Gibson is that he has the most amazing imagination, and writes completely beautifully, in this dark, twisted way. The book has a good plot line, although slightly spy story-ish.. I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. He will always be one of my favourite writers. But from now on, I just want him to leave the present alone. Give me back my William Gibson, rainy California, quantumteleporting, cyberspace future!

Gibson still at the top of his game, 25 Aug 2008
It took me a few chapters to really get into this but once I did I found it hard to put down. As usual with Gibson, he comes up with some cultural movements that I hadn't been aware of until I picked the book up: guerrilla marketing in Pattern Recognition and this time locative art. Technological trends aside, Gibson has a wonderful way with language. His sentences tend to be punchy like Raymond Chandler but far more poetic at the same time. I could really just read this book for his use of words- the plot is just extra icing on top. I can picture each scene with a cinema type clarity that few other authors achieve (for me at least) I love the little details he gives us. GSG-9 Adidas swat shoes? How cool. Only little quibble: covert ear pieces as used by the likes of Brown do not have wires attached to them. They work on induction loops like modern hearing aides and have done so for many years.

Intriguing, But Less Kinetic, Fictional Exploration Of Our Time From William Gibson, 08 Aug 2008
There's probably no one else I can think of who can write so vividly, and inquisitively, about our contemporary techno-psychological landscape than William Gibson. His 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition" remains among the best - if not the best (of which I am certain) - fictional depiction of American media-obsessed culture in the aftermath of 9/11. It was also his best novel in years, a riveting techno-thriller about "cool hunter" Cayce Pollard's search for the mysterious internet "The Footage" which had acquired a most bizarre cult-like status amongst Internet lurkers. "Spook Country", Gibson's latest novel, is a sequel of sorts, introducing us once more to the enigmatic Belgian advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, owner of Big Ant advertising firm. This time he sends another young woman, Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist for Node - a magazine which doesn't exist yet - on a rather mundane quest to find one Bobby Chombo, a "producer", whose day job involves checking out military navigation gear. We encounter her, early one morning, in a Los Angeles hotel room, on assignment for Node, collecting information on the local underground artistic movement of virtual reality-based "locative art" for an article in the nascent magazine's debut issue. In classic William Gibson literary mode, there are two other subplots which represent other, still larger, pieces of the puzzle that Henry is seeking to solve, involving Tito, a young Cuban Chinese New Yorker whose family has had intelligence ties to both the CIA and KGB, and the Russian-speaking junkie Milgrim, addicted to expensive prescription high-anxiety drugs, who finds himself quite literally, "joined to the hip" with his pharmaceutical benefactor, the mysterious Brown, someone who has some hidden ties to a military, most likely Russia's.

Looming over this entire fictional landscape is of course Hubertus Bigend himself, who doesn't appear until the end of the first third of "Spook Country". Here, more so than "Pattern Recognition", he comes across as some omniscient "Intelligent Designer", orchestrating the events as they unfold, with the other principal characters - especially Hollis, herself - acting as puppets in some vast marionette theater of his own uniquely Byzantine design. We will learn that Bigend has chosen Henry for his mission since she's a former member of the rock band The Curfew, which, apparently, has had ties to Bobby Chombo. There's a memorable chase scene that plays out along the sidewalks - and one restaurant - of New York City's Union Square (New York City finally makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel, and to his credit, Gibson does a splendid job depicting its unique urban rhythms.). Eventually, the three plot lines converge and intersect, in an ornate, yet tidy, resolution in Gibson's hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia (The Canadian seaport, like New York City, also makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel.). There are references of course to contemporary events, such as the American occupation of Iraq, but Gibson presents them as if they were the literary equivalent of a GOOGLE search, allowing the reader to decide their relevant significance to the novel's unfolding events in a decidedly neutral manner.

"Spook Country" is definitely not one of William Gibson's best novels, but an inferior novel from him is still far more fascinating than many best novels I have read from other, lesser novelists who lack his uncanny ability to depict in hallucinatory, lyrical prose, our Internet-dominated culture (It's an artistic trait I'd expect from the same writer who coined the term "cyberspace" years ago, before the Internet was created as the central, unifying information repository of our time.). It is still one of the best literary achievements in fiction published this year, and one that is artistically, if not stylistically, similar to the themes explored by Rick Moody in his recently published novella collection "Right Livelihoods". Along with "Right Livelihoods", "Spook Country" is the most compelling piece of newly published fiction I have read this summer. Without question, it is still a memorable novel from someone whom I regard as the most important writer of our time.

Case was the best interface cowboy who ever ran in Earth's computer matrix. Then he double- crossed the wrong people.… Winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards.

meandering with bright points but short on ideas, 10 Nov 2008
This book meanders about. Majority of the book is 3 separate stories that link at the end - but the stories are mixed up so a challenge to track whats actually going on. If you take a couple of weeks to get through, then this bouncing between plots is confusing & irritating.

As to the rather shallow plot (or plots), we all know that this book is REALLY about techy what-if cyberspace stuff - the plot is just a platform for Gibson to exhibit & expound his concepts & imagination. I cant help feeling that the author was a bit tired & short on ideas when he wrote this one.

The dark atmosphere is well created. Namedropping of designer brands is tiresome & begins to grate. I do actually know about Stark furniture so can appreciate these touches - but the continual reference to brands of phone / shoe / hotel / coat / sunglasses etc really alienates me!

If you are a loyal follower of Gibson (as most reviewers seem to be) you wont be dissapointed. It still is a good read - and certainly improves when the plots come together in the last chapter, but its not his best.

Give it up Bill, 22 Sep 2008
The grand old man of that dead genre: Cyberpunk (which was neither punk nor spectacularly technologically savvy, unlike say, Neal Stephenson) is back to bore us rigid. A shaggy dog story which goes absolutely nowhere. While Gibson's old narrative trick (and let's face it, he only has one) - to take three narrative threads and alternate them by chapter until in some hopeless contrivance they all join together at the end - works quite nicely, the tedious techno porn (everything has a matte black or grey surface) and the barely beleivable characters (pesky things in Gibson's sad world) just drag the whole thing down.
The ending is basically a total let-down. Since Mona Lisa Overdrive this guy's stuff has got more and more derivative and lame.
It's modern life as viewed by someone who's too rich, too lazy and too self-regarding to really have any literary merit whatsoever.
Avoid.

Go back to the future, William Gibson!, 10 Sep 2008
This is William Gibson's first novel set explicitly in the proper present, so it lacks that sense of exploring the near future which so haunts all his other books. For me this meant that instead of letting myself get swept away into the story, I kept comparing Spook Country's events with what I know to be the case about the times in which I live.

Gibson has done the art world before - Neuromancer I think features a search for artworks by the real-life eccentric Joseph Cornell. This book switches uneasily between art and more serious intrigue... sometimes even uncomfortably.

But for me there was too much real life! I enjoyed all the stuff about the ex-rock band singer Hollis Henry, but every time there was a mention of Philip Starck hotels or Pete Townshend's nose or ... anything real, I just slightly cringed. I just wanted to go back to the world Gibson usually sites his books in, where everything is made up, and enjoying that fictionality and that level of imagination is one of the pleasures of reading.

There were even some things which I thought were mistakes. One tiny example that doesn't spoil the plot: there is a supposed Wikipedia entry on one of the characters, which Hollis reads. Seriously, NO wikipedia entry is that well-written. Really. Even the ones people write for themselves.

Having made my criticisms, what I will say about William Gibson is that he has the most amazing imagination, and writes completely beautifully, in this dark, twisted way. The book has a good plot line, although slightly spy story-ish.. I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. He will always be one of my favourite writers. But from now on, I just want him to leave the present alone. Give me back my William Gibson, rainy California, quantumteleporting, cyberspace future!

Gibson still at the top of his game, 25 Aug 2008
It took me a few chapters to really get into this but once I did I found it hard to put down. As usual with Gibson, he comes up with some cultural movements that I hadn't been aware of until I picked the book up: guerrilla marketing in Pattern Recognition and this time locative art. Technological trends aside, Gibson has a wonderful way with language. His sentences tend to be punchy like Raymond Chandler but far more poetic at the same time. I could really just read this book for his use of words- the plot is just extra icing on top. I can picture each scene with a cinema type clarity that few other authors achieve (for me at least) I love the little details he gives us. GSG-9 Adidas swat shoes? How cool. Only little quibble: covert ear pieces as used by the likes of Brown do not have wires attached to them. They work on induction loops like modern hearing aides and have done so for many years.

Intriguing, But Less Kinetic, Fictional Exploration Of Our Time From William Gibson, 08 Aug 2008
There's probably no one else I can think of who can write so vividly, and inquisitively, about our contemporary techno-psychological landscape than William Gibson. His 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition" remains among the best - if not the best (of which I am certain) - fictional depiction of American media-obsessed culture in the aftermath of 9/11. It was also his best novel in years, a riveting techno-thriller about "cool hunter" Cayce Pollard's search for the mysterious internet "The Footage" which had acquired a most bizarre cult-like status amongst Internet lurkers. "Spook Country", Gibson's latest novel, is a sequel of sorts, introducing us once more to the enigmatic Belgian advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, owner of Big Ant advertising firm. This time he sends another young woman, Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist for Node - a magazine which doesn't exist yet - on a rather mundane quest to find one Bobby Chombo, a "producer", whose day job involves checking out military navigation gear. We encounter her, early one morning, in a Los Angeles hotel room, on assignment for Node, collecting information on the local underground artistic movement of virtual reality-based "locative art" for an article in the nascent magazine's debut issue. In classic William Gibson literary mode, there are two other subplots which represent other, still larger, pieces of the puzzle that Henry is seeking to solve, involving Tito, a young Cuban Chinese New Yorker whose family has had intelligence ties to both the CIA and KGB, and the Russian-speaking junkie Milgrim, addicted to expensive prescription high-anxiety drugs, who finds himself quite literally, "joined to the hip" with his pharmaceutical benefactor, the mysterious Brown, someone who has some hidden ties to a military, most likely Russia's.

Looming over this entire fictional landscape is of course Hubertus Bigend himself, who doesn't appear until the end of the first third of "Spook Country". Here, more so than "Pattern Recognition", he comes across as some omniscient "Intelligent Designer", orchestrating the events as they unfold, with the other principal characters - especially Hollis, herself - acting as puppets in some vast marionette theater of his own uniquely Byzantine design. We will learn that Bigend has chosen Henry for his mission since she's a former member of the rock band The Curfew, which, apparently, has had ties to Bobby Chombo. There's a memorable chase scene that plays out along the sidewalks - and one restaurant - of New York City's Union Square (New York City finally makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel, and to his credit, Gibson does a splendid job depicting its unique urban rhythms.). Eventually, the three plot lines converge and intersect, in an ornate, yet tidy, resolution in Gibson's hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia (The Canadian seaport, like New York City, also makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel.). There are references of course to contemporary events, such as the American occupation of Iraq, but Gibson presents them as if they were the literary equivalent of a GOOGLE search, allowing the reader to decide their relevant significance to the novel's unfolding events in a decidedly neutral manner.

"Spook Country" is definitely not one of William Gibson's best novels, but an inferior novel from him is still far more fascinating than many best novels I have read from other, lesser novelists who lack his uncanny ability to depict in hallucinatory, lyrical prose, our Internet-dominated culture (It's an artistic trait I'd expect from the same writer who coined the term "cyberspace" years ago, before the Internet was created as the central, unifying information repository of our time.). It is still one of the best literary achievements in fiction published this year, and one that is artistically, if not stylistically, similar to the themes explored by Rick Moody in his recently published novella collection "Right Livelihoods". Along with "Right Livelihoods", "Spook Country" is the most compelling piece of newly published fiction I have read this summer. Without question, it is still a memorable novel from someone whom I regard as the most important writer of our time.

I'm sorry but..., 21 Nov 2008
I find Gibson pretty much unreadable. I really struggled to finish this book as I just don't care about any of the characters. His style of writing seems much better suited to short stories, and he is an absolute master at invocation of mood and setting. I just find anything longer than a few pages intensely stodgy. Go and get burning chrome instead and tackle it in short chunks...

Vague, rushed, poorly defined., 15 Nov 2008
This book suffers from an incoherent plot, ill-defined characters and a generally ineffective writing style.

I Didn't manage to finish this, though i rarely give up on books. I got to about 2/3rds through and realised i neither knew who these characters were or had any interest in their fate.

The internet has come to define our future as a race. Gibson has the honour of being the first Sci-fi writer to adress this fact extensively. This makes Neuromancer noteworthy but not a good piece of literature.

Visionary but spoiled by an incomprehensible style , 03 Nov 2008
I was left with very mixed feelings about this book - Philip K Dick meets Quentin Tarantino. It was written in the early 1980's and is clearly creative, visionary and ahead of its time in the concepts and contents. Personally I think it has aged pretty well, and has proved to be prescient for concepts such as cyberspace and virtual reality. One can easily see how it has created the ideas found in The Matrix series. Why just 2-stars then? Well, unfortunately its echoes are found in the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, rather than the original film which was excellent. Like the two sequels this book slides into incomprehensibility. The virtual reality concepts are overwhelmed by the constant repetition of obscure jargon, and an extremely opaque and confusing writing style. The first section of the book opens in a Tokyo suburb and the constant overuse of Japanese terms quickly becomes annoying. Characters are quickly introduced, and just as quickly disappear, with some very messy action scenes and dialogue. I assume the writer is being deliberately obscure in narrating what is actually going on for some sort of effect. Rather than atmospheric, I quickly found this highly annoying. If anything the plot becomes increasingly opaque, and the motivation and allegiances of the characters remaining obscure. Despite the fact I actually read the book carefully, I think parts of the plot (such as the machinations of the Ashpool family and what actually transpired at the Villa Straylight) partially eluded me. However, by this point I'd stopped caring and just wanted to finish it. I'm glad I read it, because of its place in the Sci-Fi genre, but I'm certainly not tempted to reach for another Gibson.
I can't help thinking this would have been better in the hands of a more competent writer, or at least one adopting a style designed to engage rather than completely baffle the reader!

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson changes focus from the not-too-distant future of his slick, influential SF novels to a netwise vision of strangeness just hours or minutes from the present.

Talented, vulnerable heroine Cayce Pollard is an adept "coolhunter" with an intuitive gift for telling whether any image or logo will be a commercial flop. The downside is her tortured sensitivity--like an allergic reaction--to logo overexposure. She can just about bear to fly BA, but not cross-promoted Virgin...

When she's consulted by top ad agency Blue Ant and gives the thumbs-down to their designer's latest concept, the edgy urban paranoia begins. A porn-site URL that she never accessed appears in her browser history, and the phone's redial button goes somewhere it shouldn't. The same faces appear around her as she flits between continents. Small world. Worryingly small.

As new vistas open in viral marketing and stealth publicity, the big admen are all too interested in Cayce's private hobby: mystery fragments of haunting movie footage, released anonymously on the Web. This unknown "garage Kubrick" auteur has spawned a fascinated, obsessive online cult. Is this a brilliant marketing operation for a still-unknown product, or something with different, dark and painful roots?

Cayce's personal quest, or flight, converges on the source of the Footage, helped and threatened by memorably offbeat characters. In Britain, these include a pettily sadistic woman who seems to know Cayce's most carefully concealed phobias, and an embittered collector of obsolete mechanical calculators made in Liechtenstein. Tokyo: a lovesick Japanese geek whose "otaku" friends find a hidden digital signature in the Footage. Moscow: a strange girl whose uncle is a fabulously wealthy--and dangerously protected--Russian mafioso...

Here's Cayce in a Japanese hotel, showing that wittily lyrical Gibson view of the world and his deft use of brand names:

She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home.

This world of glittering surfaces and pulsating data connections is mined with surprises, betrayals, flurries of violence and unexpected allies. This is a very 21st century novel: compulsive reading, and vintage Gibson. --David Langford

meandering with bright points but short on ideas, 10 Nov 2008
This book meanders about. Majority of the book is 3 separate stories that link at the end - but the stories are mixed up so a challenge to track whats actually going on. If you take a couple of weeks to get through, then this bouncing between plots is confusing & irritating.

As to the rather shallow plot (or plots), we all know that this book is REALLY about techy what-if cyberspace stuff - the plot is just a platform for Gibson to exhibit & expound his concepts & imagination. I cant help feeling that the author was a bit tired & short on ideas when he wrote this one.

The dark atmosphere is well created. Namedropping of designer brands is tiresome & begins to grate. I do actually know about Stark furniture so can appreciate these touches - but the continual reference to brands of phone / shoe / hotel / coat / sunglasses etc really alienates me!

If you are a loyal follower of Gibson (as most reviewers seem to be) you wont be dissapointed. It still is a good read - and certainly improves when the plots come together in the last chapter, but its not his best.

Give it up Bill, 22 Sep 2008
The grand old man of that dead genre: Cyberpunk (which was neither punk nor spectacularly technologically savvy, unlike say, Neal Stephenson) is back to bore us rigid. A shaggy dog story which goes absolutely nowhere. While Gibson's old narrative trick (and let's face it, he only has one) - to take three narrative threads and alternate them by chapter until in some hopeless contrivance they all join together at the end - works quite nicely, the tedious techno porn (everything has a matte black or grey surface) and the barely beleivable characters (pesky things in Gibson's sad world) just drag the whole thing down.
The ending is basically a total let-down. Since Mona Lisa Overdrive this guy's stuff has got more and more derivative and lame.
It's modern life as viewed by someone who's too rich, too lazy and too self-regarding to really have any literary merit whatsoever.
Avoid.

Go back to the future, William Gibson!, 10 Sep 2008
This is William Gibson's first novel set explicitly in the proper present, so it lacks that sense of exploring the near future which so haunts all his other books. For me this meant that instead of letting myself get swept away into the story, I kept comparing Spook Country's events with what I know to be the case about the times in which I live.

Gibson has done the art world before - Neuromancer I think features a search for artworks by the real-life eccentric Joseph Cornell. This book switches uneasily between art and more serious intrigue... sometimes even uncomfortably.

But for me there was too much real life! I enjoyed all the stuff about the ex-rock band singer Hollis Henry, but every time there was a mention of Philip Starck hotels or Pete Townshend's nose or ... anything real, I just slightly cringed. I just wanted to go back to the world Gibson usually sites his books in, where everything is made up, and enjoying that fictionality and that level of imagination is one of the pleasures of reading.

There were even some things which I thought were mistakes. One tiny example that doesn't spoil the plot: there is a supposed Wikipedia entry on one of the characters, which Hollis reads. Seriously, NO wikipedia entry is that well-written. Really. Even the ones people write for themselves.

Having made my criticisms, what I will say about William Gibson is that he has the most amazing imagination, and writes completely beautifully, in this dark, twisted way. The book has a good plot line, although slightly spy story-ish.. I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. He will always be one of my favourite writers. But from now on, I just want him to leave the present alone. Give me back my William Gibson, rainy California, quantumteleporting, cyberspace future!

Gibson still at the top of his game, 25 Aug 2008
It took me a few chapters to really get into this but once I did I found it hard to put down. As usual with Gibson, he comes up with some cultural movements that I hadn't been aware of until I picked the book up: guerrilla marketing in Pattern Recognition and this time locative art. Technological trends aside, Gibson has a wonderful way with language. His sentences tend to be punchy like Raymond Chandler but far more poetic at the same time. I could really just read this book for his use of words- the plot is just extra icing on top. I can picture each scene with a cinema type clarity that few other authors achieve (for me at least) I love the little details he gives us. GSG-9 Adidas swat shoes? How cool. Only little quibble: covert ear pieces as used by the likes of Brown do not have wires attached to them. They work on induction loops like modern hearing aides and have done so for many years.

Intriguing, But Less Kinetic, Fictional Exploration Of Our Time From William Gibson, 08 Aug 2008
There's probably no one else I can think of who can write so vividly, and inquisitively, about our contemporary techno-psychological landscape than William Gibson. His 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition" remains among the best - if not the best (of which I am certain) - fictional depiction of American media-obsessed culture in the aftermath of 9/11. It was also his best novel in years, a riveting techno-thriller about "cool hunter" Cayce Pollard's search for the mysterious internet "The Footage" which had acquired a most bizarre cult-like status amongst Internet lurkers. "Spook Country", Gibson's latest novel, is a sequel of sorts, introducing us once more to the enigmatic Belgian advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, owner of Big Ant advertising firm. This time he sends another young woman, Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist for Node - a magazine which doesn't exist yet - on a rather mundane quest to find one Bobby Chombo, a "producer", whose day job involves checking out military navigation gear. We encounter her, early one morning, in a Los Angeles hotel room, on assignment for Node, collecting information on the local underground artistic movement of virtual reality-based "locative art" for an article in the nascent magazine's debut issue. In classic William Gibson literary mode, there are two other subplots which represent other, still larger, pieces of the puzzle that Henry is seeking to solve, involving Tito, a young Cuban Chinese New Yorker whose family has had intelligence ties to both the CIA and KGB, and the Russian-speaking junkie Milgrim, addicted to expensive prescription high-anxiety drugs, who finds himself quite literally, "joined to the hip" with his pharmaceutical benefactor, the mysterious Brown, someone who has some hidden ties to a military, most likely Russia's.

Looming over this entire fictional landscape is of course Hubertus Bigend himself, who doesn't appear until the end of the first third of "Spook Country". Here, more so than "Pattern Recognition", he comes across as some omniscient "Intelligent Designer", orchestrating the events as they unfold, with the other principal characters - especially Hollis, herself - acting as puppets in some vast marionette theater of his own uniquely Byzantine design. We will learn that Bigend has chosen Henry for his mission since she's a former member of the rock band The Curfew, which, apparently, has had ties to Bobby Chombo. There's a memorable chase scene that plays out along the sidewalks - and one restaurant - of New York City's Union Square (New York City finally makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel, and to his credit, Gibson does a splendid job depicting its unique urban rhythms.). Eventually, the three plot lines converge and intersect, in an ornate, yet tidy, resolution in Gibson's hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia (The Canadian seaport, like New York City, also makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel.). There are references of course to contemporary events, such as the American occupation of Iraq, but Gibson presents them as if they were the literary equivalent of a GOOGLE search, allowing the reader to decide their relevant significance to the novel's unfolding events in a decidedly neutral manner.

"Spook Country" is definitely not one of William Gibson's best novels, but an inferior novel from him is still far more fascinating than many best novels I have read from other, lesser novelists who lack his uncanny ability to depict in hallucinatory, lyrical prose, our Internet-dominated culture (It's an artistic trait I'd expect from the same writer who coined the term "cyberspace" years ago, before the Internet was created as the central, unifying information repository of our time.). It is still one of the best literary achievements in fiction published this year, and one that is artistically, if not stylistically, similar to the themes explored by Rick Moody in his recently published novella collection "Right Livelihoods". Along with "Right Livelihoods", "Spook Country" is the most compelling piece of newly published fiction I have read this summer. Without question, it is still a memorable novel from someone whom I regard as the most important writer of our time.

I'm sorry but..., 21 Nov 2008
I find Gibson pretty much unreadable. I really struggled to finish this book as I just don't care about any of the characters. His style of writing seems much better suited to short stories, and he is an absolute master at invocation of mood and setting. I just find anything longer than a few pages intensely stodgy. Go and get burning chrome instead and tackle it in short chunks...

Vague, rushed, poorly defined., 15 Nov 2008
This book suffers from an incoherent plot, ill-defined characters and a generally ineffective writing style.

I Didn't manage to finish this, though i rarely give up on books. I got to about 2/3rds through and realised i neither knew who these characters were or had any interest in their fate.

The internet has come to define our future as a race. Gibson has the honour of being the first Sci-fi writer to adress this fact extensively. This makes Neuromancer noteworthy but not a good piece of literature.

Visionary but spoiled by an incomprehensible style , 03 Nov 2008
I was left with very mixed feelings about this book - Philip K Dick meets Quentin Tarantino. It was written in the early 1980's and is clearly creative, visionary and ahead of its time in the concepts and contents. Personally I think it has aged pretty well, and has proved to be prescient for concepts such as cyberspace and virtual reality. One can easily see how it has created the ideas found in The Matrix series. Why just 2-stars then? Well, unfortunately its echoes are found in the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, rather than the original film which was excellent. Like the two sequels this book slides into incomprehensibility. The virtual reality concepts are overwhelmed by the constant repetition of obscure jargon, and an extremely opaque and confusing writing style. The first section of the book opens in a Tokyo suburb and the constant overuse of Japanese terms quickly becomes annoying. Characters are quickly introduced, and just as quickly disappear, with some very messy action scenes and dialogue. I assume the writer is being deliberately obscure in narrating what is actually going on for some sort of effect. Rather than atmospheric, I quickly found this highly annoying. If anything the plot becomes increasingly opaque, and the motivation and allegiances of the characters remaining obscure. Despite the fact I actually read the book carefully, I think parts of the plot (such as the machinations of the Ashpool family and what actually transpired at the Villa Straylight) partially eluded me. However, by this point I'd stopped caring and just wanted to finish it. I'm glad I read it, because of its place in the Sci-Fi genre, but I'm certainly not tempted to reach for another Gibson.
I can't help thinking this would have been better in the hands of a more competent writer, or at least one adopting a style designed to engage rather than completely baffle the reader!

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

Excellent - an all time favourite, 21 Jul 2007
I have read nearly all of William Gibson's work and I found this to be the best so far. Carefully crafted with a real sense of character I was hooked on it in no time. It is SF but more in the style of JG Ballard rather than a conventional sort of way. More subtle and, personally, more interesting in the long run. Looking forward to Spook Country already...

Dense novel tracks the meaning of brands, 12 Jul 2007
William Gibson is best known for his novel Neuromancer, which helped crystallize the science fiction movement called cyberpunk. This novel is not nearly as dramatic, and its heroes will not spawn as many pop culture imitators. While all of Gibson's work is extremely sensitive to economic concerns, this story offers readers an acutely attuned sensitivity to issues of style, design, patterns and meaning. This sensitivity is quite literal in Cayce Pollard, the main character, who experiences brand recognition - and the possibilities inherent in brands- on a visceral level. She feels the impact of brands, just as her fellow core of Web devotees feel the intense meaning of a set of film fragments they find on the Internet. These snippets turn out to be the work of a crippled genius in the wreckage of post-Soviet Russia. This is a quiet book, with an often-confusing plot that depends on style, word play, and references to pop and high-culture phenomenon. Though structured as a witty mystery, it is also the rarest of novels: a work of fiction that offers a new perspective on business while capturing the heightened feel of a specific industry. We recommend it to those who work with design and brands, those who are patient, style-loving readers and those who are curious about what the near future may feel like. If you don't want to know how the plot turns out, stop reading here.


a non SF, not really Cyber-Punk, Thriller from BG, 06 Feb 2007
awesome, IMHO unless you pick up a book that is part of a series, then you should treat a book as an individual piece of work. So many reviews here harp on about SF and Cyber-Punk, this book is a Thriller in the most traditional sense and it seemed to be brilliantly written. So yes Bill writes non-SF now. Great; read this book.

Perhaps my favourite book ever, 26 Jun 2006
This is at the end of a long road for William Gibson. Fans of the neuromancer et al. should be shocked: he can write now. The prose in this book is lovely. The flavour of what he does with that language is very close to some of the early cyberpunk concerns, but set in the present day (more or less). It's altogether a much subtler, more mature work, in a world where cyberspace exists, not as an idealized 3D medium but as a murky but fascinating medium none the less. Similarly he doesn't imagine edge cities of the future, but instead references those which already exist. It's about art and fashion and cyberspace and advertising, and it's not to be missed if the future of our culture fascinates you as it does me.

"mature and intelligent", 25 May 2006
I feel that this represents a real step forward for Gibson, he now has the skill to set books in the current era rather than some fanciful future.

While his previous works are perfectly enjoyable this brings his edgy punk ideas to a world which we all inhabit.

Several interesting ideas are explored, in particular the concepts of mirror world, advertising techniques and the fascinating Curtas calculators.

The only dissapointment is the addition of the 9/11 storyline, it was a totally pointless inclusion in this otherwise excellent book

meandering with bright points but short on ideas, 10 Nov 2008
This book meanders about. Majority of the book is 3 separate stories that link at the end - but the stories are mixed up so a challenge to track whats actually going on. If you take a couple of weeks to get through, then this bouncing between plots is confusing & irritating.

As to the rather shallow plot (or plots), we all know that this book is REALLY about techy what-if cyberspace stuff - the plot is just a platform for Gibson to exhibit & expound his concepts & imagination. I cant help feeling that the author was a bit tired & short on ideas when he wrote this one.

The dark atmosphere is well created. Namedropping of designer brands is tiresome & begins to grate. I do actually know about Stark furniture so can appreciate these touches - but the continual reference to brands of phone / shoe / hotel / coat / sunglasses etc really alienates me!

If you are a loyal follower of Gibson (as most reviewers seem to be) you wont be dissapointed. It still is a good read - and certainly improves when the plots come together in the last chapter, but its not his best.

Give it up Bill, 22 Sep 2008
The grand old man of that dead genre: Cyberpunk (which was neither punk nor spectacularly technologically savvy, unlike say, Neal Stephenson) is back to bore us rigid. A shaggy dog story which goes absolutely nowhere. While Gibson's old narrative trick (and let's face it, he only has one) - to take three narrative threads and alternate them by chapter until in some hopeless contrivance they all join together at the end - works quite nicely, the tedious techno porn (everything has a matte black or grey surface) and the barely beleivable characters (pesky things in Gibson's sad world) just drag the whole thing down.
The ending is basically a total let-down. Since Mona Lisa Overdrive this guy's stuff has got more and more derivative and lame.
It's modern life as viewed by someone who's too rich, too lazy and too self-regarding to really have any literary merit whatsoever.
Avoid.

Go back to the future, William Gibson!, 10 Sep 2008
This is William Gibson's first novel set explicitly in the proper present, so it lacks that sense of exploring the near future which so haunts all his other books. For me this meant that instead of letting myself get swept away into the story, I kept comparing Spook Country's events with what I know to be the case about the times in which I live.

Gibson has done the art world before - Neuromancer I think features a search for artworks by the real-life eccentric Joseph Cornell. This book switches uneasily between art and more serious intrigue... sometimes even uncomfortably.

But for me there was too much real life! I enjoyed all the stuff about the ex-rock band singer Hollis Henry, but every time there was a mention of Philip Starck hotels or Pete Townshend's nose or ... anything real, I just slightly cringed. I just wanted to go back to the world Gibson usually sites his books in, where everything is made up, and enjoying that fictionality and that level of imagination is one of the pleasures of reading.

There were even some things which I thought were mistakes. One tiny example that doesn't spoil the plot: there is a supposed Wikipedia entry on one of the characters, which Hollis reads. Seriously, NO wikipedia entry is that well-written. Really. Even the ones people write for themselves.

Having made my criticisms, what I will say about William Gibson is that he has the most amazing imagination, and writes completely beautifully, in this dark, twisted way. The book has a good plot line, although slightly spy story-ish.. I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. He will always be one of my favourite writers. But from now on, I just want him to leave the present alone. Give me back my William Gibson, rainy California, quantumteleporting, cyberspace future!

Gibson still at the top of his game, 25 Aug 2008
It took me a few chapters to really get into this but once I did I found it hard to put down. As usual with Gibson, he comes up with some cultural movements that I hadn't been aware of until I picked the book up: guerrilla marketing in Pattern Recognition and this time locative art. Technological trends aside, Gibson has a wonderful way with language. His sentences tend to be punchy like Raymond Chandler but far more poetic at the same time. I could really just read this book for his use of words- the plot is just extra icing on top. I can picture each scene with a cinema type clarity that few other authors achieve (for me at least) I love the little details he gives us. GSG-9 Adidas swat shoes? How cool. Only little quibble: covert ear pieces as used by the likes of Brown do not have wires attached to them. They work on induction loops like modern hearing aides and have done so for many years.

Intriguing, But Less Kinetic, Fictional Exploration Of Our Time From William Gibson, 08 Aug 2008
There's probably no one else I can think of who can write so vividly, and inquisitively, about our contemporary techno-psychological landscape than William Gibson. His 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition" remains among the best - if not the best (of which I am certain) - fictional depiction of American media-obsessed culture in the aftermath of 9/11. It was also his best novel in years, a riveting techno-thriller about "cool hunter" Cayce Pollard's search for the mysterious internet "The Footage" which had acquired a most bizarre cult-like status amongst Internet lurkers. "Spook Country", Gibson's latest novel, is a sequel of sorts, introducing us once more to the enigmatic Belgian advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, owner of Big Ant advertising firm. This time he sends another young woman, Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist for Node - a magazine which doesn't exist yet - on a rather mundane quest to find one Bobby Chombo, a "producer", whose day job involves checking out military navigation gear. We encounter her, early one morning, in a Los Angeles hotel room, on assignment for Node, collecting information on the local underground artistic movement of virtual reality-based "locative art" for an article in the nascent magazine's debut issue. In classic William Gibson literary mode, there are two other subplots which represent other, still larger, pieces of the puzzle that Henry is seeking to solve, involving Tito, a young Cuban Chinese New Yorker whose family has had intelligence ties to both the CIA and KGB, and the Russian-speaking junkie Milgrim, addicted to expensive prescription high-anxiety drugs, who finds himself quite literally, "joined to the hip" with his pharmaceutical benefactor, the mysterious Brown, someone who has some hidden ties to a military, most likely Russia's.

Looming over this entire fictional landscape is of course Hubertus Bigend himself, who doesn't appear until the end of the first third of "Spook Country". Here, more so than "Pattern Recognition", he comes across as some omniscient "Intelligent Designer", orchestrating the events as they unfold, with the other principal characters - especially Hollis, herself - acting as puppets in some vast marionette theater of his own uniquely Byzantine design. We will learn that Bigend has chosen Henry for his mission since she's a former member of the rock band The Curfew, which, apparently, has had ties to Bobby Chombo. There's a memorable chase scene that plays out along the sidewalks - and one restaurant - of New York City's Union Square (New York City finally makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel, and to his credit, Gibson does a splendid job depicting its unique urban rhythms.). Eventually, the three plot lines converge and intersect, in an ornate, yet tidy, resolution in Gibson's hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia (The Canadian seaport, like New York City, also makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel.). There are references of course to contemporary events, such as the American occupation of Iraq, but Gibson presents them as if they were the literary equivalent of a GOOGLE search, allowing the reader to decide their relevant significance to the novel's unfolding events in a decidedly neutral manner.

"Spook Country" is definitely not one of William Gibson's best novels, but an inferior novel from him is still far more fascinating than many best novels I have read from other, lesser novelists who lack his uncanny ability to depict in hallucinatory, lyrical prose, our Internet-dominated culture (It's an artistic trait I'd expect from the same writer who coined the term "cyberspace" years ago, before the Internet was created as the central, unifying information repository of our time.). It is still one of the best literary achievements in fiction published this year, and one that is artistically, if not stylistically, similar to the themes explored by Rick Moody in his recently published novella collection "Right Livelihoods". Along with "Right Livelihoods", "Spook Country" is the most compelling piece of newly published fiction I have read this summer. Without question, it is still a memorable novel from someone whom I regard as the most important writer of our time.

I'm sorry but..., 21 Nov 2008
I find Gibson pretty much unreadable. I really struggled to finish this book as I just don't care about any of the characters. His style of writing seems much better suited to short stories, and he is an absolute master at invocation of mood and setting. I just find anything longer than a few pages intensely stodgy. Go and get burning chrome instead and tackle it in short chunks...

Vague, rushed, poorly defined., 15 Nov 2008
This book suffers from an incoherent plot, ill-defined characters and a generally ineffective writing style.

I Didn't manage to finish this, though i rarely give up on books. I got to about 2/3rds through and realised i neither knew who these characters were or had any interest in their fate.

The internet has come to define our future as a race. Gibson has the honour of being the first Sci-fi writer to adress this fact extensively. This makes Neuromancer noteworthy but not a good piece of literature.

Visionary but spoiled by an incomprehensible style , 03 Nov 2008
I was left with very mixed feelings about this book - Philip K Dick meets Quentin Tarantino. It was written in the early 1980's and is clearly creative, visionary and ahead of its time in the concepts and contents. Personally I think it has aged pretty well, and has proved to be prescient for concepts such as cyberspace and virtual reality. One can easily see how it has created the ideas found in The Matrix series. Why just 2-stars then? Well, unfortunately its echoes are found in the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, rather than the original film which was excellent. Like the two sequels this book slides into incomprehensibility. The virtual reality concepts are overwhelmed by the constant repetition of obscure jargon, and an extremely opaque and confusing writing style. The first section of the book opens in a Tokyo suburb and the constant overuse of Japanese terms quickly becomes annoying. Characters are quickly introduced, and just as quickly disappear, with some very messy action scenes and dialogue. I assume the writer is being deliberately obscure in narrating what is actually going on for some sort of effect. Rather than atmospheric, I quickly found this highly annoying. If anything the plot becomes increasingly opaque, and the motivation and allegiances of the characters remaining obscure. Despite the fact I actually read the book carefully, I think parts of the plot (such as the machinations of the Ashpool family and what actually transpired at the Villa Straylight) partially eluded me. However, by this point I'd stopped caring and just wanted to finish it. I'm glad I read it, because of its place in the Sci-Fi genre, but I'm certainly not tempted to reach for another Gibson.
I can't help thinking this would have been better in the hands of a more competent writer, or at least one adopting a style designed to engage rather than completely baffle the reader!

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

Excellent - an all time favourite, 21 Jul 2007
I have read nearly all of William Gibson's work and I found this to be the best so far. Carefully crafted with a real sense of character I was hooked on it in no time. It is SF but more in the style of JG Ballard rather than a conventional sort of way. More subtle and, personally, more interesting in the long run. Looking forward to Spook Country already...

Dense novel tracks the meaning of brands, 12 Jul 2007
William Gibson is best known for his novel Neuromancer, which helped crystallize the science fiction movement called cyberpunk. This novel is not nearly as dramatic, and its heroes will not spawn as many pop culture imitators. While all of Gibson's work is extremely sensitive to economic concerns, this story offers readers an acutely attuned sensitivity to issues of style, design, patterns and meaning. This sensitivity is quite literal in Cayce Pollard, the main character, who experiences brand recognition - and the possibilities inherent in brands- on a visceral level. She feels the impact of brands, just as her fellow core of Web devotees feel the intense meaning of a set of film fragments they find on the Internet. These snippets turn out to be the work of a crippled genius in the wreckage of post-Soviet Russia. This is a quiet book, with an often-confusing plot that depends on style, word play, and references to pop and high-culture phenomenon. Though structured as a witty mystery, it is also the rarest of novels: a work of fiction that offers a new perspective on business while capturing the heightened feel of a specific industry. We recommend it to those who work with design and brands, those who are patient, style-loving readers and those who are curious about what the near future may feel like. If you don't want to know how the plot turns out, stop reading here.


a non SF, not really Cyber-Punk, Thriller from BG, 06 Feb 2007
awesome, IMHO unless you pick up a book that is part of a series, then you should treat a book as an individual piece of work. So many reviews here harp on about SF and Cyber-Punk, this book is a Thriller in the most traditional sense and it seemed to be brilliantly written. So yes Bill writes non-SF now. Great; read this book.

Perhaps my favourite book ever, 26 Jun 2006
This is at the end of a long road for William Gibson. Fans of the neuromancer et al. should be shocked: he can write now. The prose in this book is lovely. The flavour of what he does with that language is very close to some of the early cyberpunk concerns, but set in the present day (more or less). It's altogether a much subtler, more mature work, in a world where cyberspace exists, not as an idealized 3D medium but as a murky but fascinating medium none the less. Similarly he doesn't imagine edge cities of the future, but instead references those which already exist. It's about art and fashion and cyberspace and advertising, and it's not to be missed if the future of our culture fascinates you as it does me.

"mature and intelligent", 25 May 2006
I feel that this represents a real step forward for Gibson, he now has the skill to set books in the current era rather than some fanciful future.

While his previous works are perfectly enjoyable this brings his edgy punk ideas to a world which we all inhabit.

Several interesting ideas are explored, in particular the concepts of mirror world, advertising techniques and the fascinating Curtas calculators.

The only dissapointment is the addition of the 9/11 storyline, it was a totally pointless inclusion in this otherwise excellent book

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

THERE ARE NO MAPS FOR THESE QUICKSILVER TERRITORIES, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive. They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

meandering with bright points but short on ideas, 10 Nov 2008
This book meanders about. Majority of the book is 3 separate stories that link at the end - but the stories are mixed up so a challenge to track whats actually going on. If you take a couple of weeks to get through, then this bouncing between plots is confusing & irritating.

As to the rather shallow plot (or plots), we all know that this book is REALLY about techy what-if cyberspace stuff - the plot is just a platform for Gibson to exhibit & expound his concepts & imagination. I cant help feeling that the author was a bit tired & short on ideas when he wrote this one.

The dark atmosphere is well created. Namedropping of designer brands is tiresome & begins to grate. I do actually know about Stark furniture so can appreciate these touches - but the continual reference to brands of phone / shoe / hotel / coat / sunglasses etc really alienates me!

If you are a loyal follower of Gibson (as most reviewers seem to be) you wont be dissapointed. It still is a good read - and certainly improves when the plots come together in the last chapter, but its not his best.

Give it up Bill, 22 Sep 2008
The grand old man of that dead genre: Cyberpunk (which was neither punk nor spectacularly technologically savvy, unlike say, Neal Stephenson) is back to bore us rigid. A shaggy dog story which goes absolutely nowhere. While Gibson's old narrative trick (and let's face it, he only has one) - to take three narrative threads and alternate them by chapter until in some hopeless contrivance they all join together at the end - works quite nicely, the tedious techno porn (everything has a matte black or grey surface) and the barely beleivable characters (pesky things in Gibson's sad world) just drag the whole thing down.
The ending is basically a total let-down. Since Mona Lisa Overdrive this guy's stuff has got more and more derivative and lame.
It's modern life as viewed by someone who's too rich, too lazy and too self-regarding to really have any literary merit whatsoever.
Avoid.

Go back to the future, William Gibson!, 10 Sep 2008
This is William Gibson's first novel set explicitly in the proper present, so it lacks that sense of exploring the near future which so haunts all his other books. For me this meant that instead of letting myself get swept away into the story, I kept comparing Spook Country's events with what I know to be the case about the times in which I live.

Gibson has done the art world before - Neuromancer I think features a search for artworks by the real-life eccentric Joseph Cornell. This book switches uneasily between art and more serious intrigue... sometimes even uncomfortably.

But for me there was too much real life! I enjoyed all the stuff about the ex-rock band singer Hollis Henry, but every time there was a mention of Philip Starck hotels or Pete Townshend's nose or ... anything real, I just slightly cringed. I just wanted to go back to the world Gibson usually sites his books in, where everything is made up, and enjoying that fictionality and that level of imagination is one of the pleasures of reading.

There were even some things which I thought were mistakes. One tiny example that doesn't spoil the plot: there is a supposed Wikipedia entry on one of the characters, which Hollis reads. Seriously, NO wikipedia entry is that well-written. Really. Even the ones people write for themselves.

Having made my criticisms, what I will say about William Gibson is that he has the most amazing imagination, and writes completely beautifully, in this dark, twisted way. The book has a good plot line, although slightly spy story-ish.. I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. He will always be one of my favourite writers. But from now on, I just want him to leave the present alone. Give me back my William Gibson, rainy California, quantumteleporting, cyberspace future!

Gibson still at the top of his game, 25 Aug 2008
It took me a few chapters to really get into this but once I did I found it hard to put down. As usual with Gibson, he comes up with some cultural movements that I hadn't been aware of until I picked the book up: guerrilla marketing in Pattern Recognition and this time locative art. Technological trends aside, Gibson has a wonderful way with language. His sentences tend to be punchy like Raymond Chandler but far more poetic at the same time. I could really just read this book for his use of words- the plot is just extra icing on top. I can picture each scene with a cinema type clarity that few other authors achieve (for me at least) I love the little details he gives us. GSG-9 Adidas swat shoes? How cool. Only little quibble: covert ear pieces as used by the likes of Brown do not have wires attached to them. They work on induction loops like modern hearing aides and have done so for many years.

Intriguing, But Less Kinetic, Fictional Exploration Of Our Time From William Gibson, 08 Aug 2008
There's probably no one else I can think of who can write so vividly, and inquisitively, about our contemporary techno-psychological landscape than William Gibson. His 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition" remains among the best - if not the best (of which I am certain) - fictional depiction of American media-obsessed culture in the aftermath of 9/11. It was also his best novel in years, a riveting techno-thriller about "cool hunter" Cayce Pollard's search for the mysterious internet "The Footage" which had acquired a most bizarre cult-like status amongst Internet lurkers. "Spook Country", Gibson's latest novel, is a sequel of sorts, introducing us once more to the enigmatic Belgian advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, owner of Big Ant advertising firm. This time he sends another young woman, Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist for Node - a magazine which doesn't exist yet - on a rather mundane quest to find one Bobby Chombo, a "producer", whose day job involves checking out military navigation gear. We encounter her, early one morning, in a Los Angeles hotel room, on assignment for Node, collecting information on the local underground artistic movement of virtual reality-based "locative art" for an article in the nascent magazine's debut issue. In classic William Gibson literary mode, there are two other subplots which represent other, still larger, pieces of the puzzle that Henry is seeking to solve, involving Tito, a young Cuban Chinese New Yorker whose family has had intelligence ties to both the CIA and KGB, and the Russian-speaking junkie Milgrim, addicted to expensive prescription high-anxiety drugs, who finds himself quite literally, "joined to the hip" with his pharmaceutical benefactor, the mysterious Brown, someone who has some hidden ties to a military, most likely Russia's.

Looming over this entire fictional landscape is of course Hubertus Bigend himself, who doesn't appear until the end of the first third of "Spook Country". Here, more so than "Pattern Recognition", he comes across as some omniscient "Intelligent Designer", orchestrating the events as they unfold, with the other principal characters - especially Hollis, herself - acting as puppets in some vast marionette theater of his own uniquely Byzantine design. We will learn that Bigend has chosen Henry for his mission since she's a former member of the rock band The Curfew, which, apparently, has had ties to Bobby Chombo. There's a memorable chase scene that plays out along the sidewalks - and one restaurant - of New York City's Union Square (New York City finally makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel, and to his credit, Gibson does a splendid job depicting its unique urban rhythms.). Eventually, the three plot lines converge and intersect, in an ornate, yet tidy, resolution in Gibson's hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia (The Canadian seaport, like New York City, also makes its literary debut in a Gibson novel.). There are references of course to contemporary events, such as the American occupation of Iraq, but Gibson presents them as if they were the literary equivalent of a GOOGLE search, allowing the reader to decide their relevant significance to the novel's unfolding events in a decidedly neutral manner.

"Spook Country" is definitely not one of William Gibson's best novels, but an inferior novel from him is still far more fascinating than many best novels I have read from other, lesser novelists who lack his uncanny ability to depict in hallucinatory, lyrical prose, our Internet-dominated culture (It's an artistic trait I'd expect from the same writer who coined the term "cyberspace" years ago, before the Internet was created as the central, unifying information repository of our time.). It is still one of the best literary achievements in fiction published this year, and one that is artistically, if not stylistically, similar to the themes explored by Rick Moody in his recently published novella collection "Right Livelihoods". Along with "Right Livelihoods", "Spook Country" is the most compelling piece of newly published fiction I have read this summer. Without question, it is still a memorable novel from someone whom I regard as the most important writer of our time.

I'm sorry but..., 21 Nov 2008
I find Gibson pretty much unreadable. I really struggled to finish this book as I just don't care about any of the characters. His style of writing seems much better suited to short stories, and he is an absolute master at invocation of mood and setting. I just find anything longer than a few pages intensely stodgy. Go and get burning chrome instead and tackle it in short chunks...

Vague, rushed, poorly defined., 15 Nov 2008
This book suffers from an incoherent plot, ill-defined characters and a generally ineffective writing style.

I Didn't manage to finish this, though i rarely give up on books. I got to about 2/3rds through and realised i neither knew who these characters were or had any interest in their fate.

The internet has come to define our future as a race. Gibson has the honour of being the first Sci-fi writer to adress this fact extensively. This makes Neuromancer noteworthy but not a good piece of literature.

Visionary but spoiled by an incomprehensible style , 03 Nov 2008
I was left with very mixed feelings about this book - Philip K Dick meets Quentin Tarantino. It was written in the early 1980's and is clearly creative, visionary and ahead of its time in the concepts and contents. Personally I think it has aged pretty well, and has proved to be prescient for concepts such as cyberspace and virtual reality. One can easily see how it has created the ideas found in The Matrix series. Why just 2-stars then? Well, unfortunately its echoes are found in the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, rather than the original film which was excellent. Like the two sequels this book slides into incomprehensibility. The virtual reality concepts are overwhelmed by the constant repetition of obscure jargon, and an extremely opaque and confusing writing style. The first section of the book opens in a Tokyo suburb and the constant overuse of Japanese terms quickly becomes annoying. Characters are quickly introduced, and just as quickly disappear, with some very messy action scenes and dialogue. I assume the writer is being deliberately obscure in narrating what is actually going on for some sort of effect. Rather than atmospheric, I quickly found this highly annoying. If anything the plot becomes increasingly opaque, and the motivation and allegiances of the characters remaining obscure. Despite the fact I actually read the book carefully, I think parts of the plot (such as the machinations of the Ashpool family and what actually transpired at the Villa Straylight) partially eluded me. However, by this point I'd stopped caring and just wanted to finish it. I'm glad I read it, because of its place in the Sci-Fi genre, but I'm certainly not tempted to reach for another Gibson.
I can't help thinking this would have been better in the hands of a more competent writer, or at least one adopting a style designed to engage rather than completely baffle the reader!

Someone to Wachowski me, 30 Dec 2007
I have mixed feelings about neuromancer: one one hand, circa 1982 it was such a staggering imaginative feat, conjuring up a breathtakingly close intellectual equivalent to the internet, coining the term and then strikingly predicting the commercialisation of "cyberspace" and it is also such a valiant stylistic effort, amalgamating Chandler's gumshoe noir with Dick's post-modern dystopian sci-fi that you can't help but be totally swept along.

On the other hand it is such a horror-show of a literary artefact, on a technical level so poorly conceived and executed, that it is almost impossible to slog through.

But slog through it I did, after a couple of aborted runs at it, and while I remain impressed at Gibson's conceptual prescience, thanks to his needlessly affected, sub-Burroughs, Beat-for-the-hell-of-it writing style I often had little idea what was going on, much less why, and from my tenuous grasp of the plot, conceptual scheme and literary motivations can't for the life of me fathom what Gibson was trying to make from his portentous ending. The thing is, and unlike many substandard novels of this type, I suspect Gibson did have a coherent point, but he buried under such a thick coating of cod-style it remains forever concealed. In his afterword he pretty much concedes all this (and handily summarises the ending in about two lines!).

There is a real art to successful stylism, evident in someone like James Ellroy whose prose, even though initially forbidding, suddenly "clicks" and carries the reader along enhancing the impression, the images, and the comprehension. Gibson's style, whilst cool, is uneven, obscure, and never manages anything other than to get in the way of a (fairly) good story.

Only fairly good: there are far too many characters, most are introduced arbitrarily and fulfil no particular function other than building the dystopian atmosphere, and even the five or six main ones are poorly drawn, wafer thin, and appear to prescribe little by way of developmental arc (Case, I think, does, but thanks to the vapid style I couldn't tell you what it was).

Reading Neuromancer in the age of the internet puts the story at another disadvantage: we now have the actual internet to compare Gibson's matrix with, and while it is undoubtedly a remarkable previsualistion in many respects, it diverges utterly in others, to the point where it is difficult now to imagine the universe Gibson paints for us.

Hardly Gibson's fault, of course, but an internet arranged in a fixed three-dimensional space seems quaint and fairly pointless when the internet we do know and love is constructed for its infinite flexibility and re-orderability - the data is just there, and you the user can use what tools you like to order and navigate it to your convenience.

They're apparently making a film of Neuromancer: I couldn't help thinking good luck; rather them than me - not only do they have to pare down and disentangle Gibson's contorted prose and plotting, they have to do it more convincingly that the Wachowski brothers did: Their Matrix franchise owes almost as much to Neuromancer as Blade Runner did to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and the bits that are different are all marked improvements.

Then again, Neuromancer was a first novel, and on that count alone it is pretty extraordinary.

Olly Buxton

The alpha and omega of cyberpunk, 23 Oct 2007
In there beginning the was case, and wintermute saw case and it was good...
The alpha and omega of cyberpunk. This novel was a watershed, any novel of the genre that followed could not helped but be shaped by this superb book. Almost lyrical in style I can remember the moment I first cracked it's spine.

Excellent - an all time favourite, 21 Jul 2007
I have read nearly all of William Gibson's work and I found this to be the best so far. Carefully crafted with a real sense of character I was hooked on it in no time. It is SF but more in the style of JG Ballard rather than a conventional sort of way. More subtle and, personally, more interesting in the long run. Looking forward to Spook Country already...

Dense novel tracks the meaning of brands, 12 Jul 2007
William Gibson is best known for his novel Neuromancer, which helped crystallize the science fiction movement called cyberpunk. This novel is not nearly as dramatic, and its heroes will not spawn as many pop culture imitators. While all of Gibson's work is extremely sensitive to economic concerns, this story offers readers an acutely attuned sensitivity to issues of style, design, patterns and meaning. This sensitivity is quite literal in Cayce Pollard, the main character, who experiences brand recognition - and the possibilities inherent in brands- on a visceral level. She feels the impact of brands, just as her fellow core of Web devotees feel the intense meaning of a set of film fragments they find on the Internet. These snippets turn out to be the work of a crippled genius in the wreckage of post-Soviet Russia. This is a quiet book, with an often-confusing plot that depends on style, word play, and references to pop and high-culture phenomenon. Though structured as a witty mystery, it is also the rarest of novels: a work of fiction that offers a new perspective on business while capturing the heightened feel of a specific industry. We recommend it to those who work with design and brands, those who are patient, style-loving readers and those who are curious about what the near future may feel like. If you don't want to know how the plot turns out, stop reading here.


a non SF, not really Cyber-Punk, Thriller from BG, 06 Feb 2007
awesome, IMHO unless you pick up a book that is part of a series, then you should treat a book as an individual piece of work. So many reviews here harp on about SF and Cyber-Punk, this book is a Thriller in the most traditional sense and it seemed to be brilliantly written. So yes Bill writes non-SF now. Great; read this book.

Perhaps my favourite book ever, 26 Jun 2006
This is at the end of a long road for William Gibson. Fans of the neuromancer et al. should be shocked: he can write now. The prose in this book is lovely. The flavour of what he does with that language is very close to some of the early cyberpunk concerns, but set in the present day (more or less). It's altogether a much subtler, more mature work, in a world where cyberspace exists, not as an idealized 3D medium but as a murky but fascinating medium none the less. Similarly he doesn't imagine edge cities of the future, but instead references those which already exist. It's about art and fashion and cyberspace and advertising, and it's not to be missed if the future of our culture fascinates you as it does me.

"mature and intelligent", 25 May 2006
I feel that this represents a real step forward for Gibson, he now has the skill to set books in the current era rather than some fanciful future.

While his previous works are perfectly enjoyable this brings his edgy punk ideas to a world which we all inhabit.

Several interesting ideas are explored, in particular the concepts of mirror world, advertising techniques and the fascinating Curtas calculators.

The only dissapointment is the addition of the 9/11 storyline, it was a totally pointless inclusion in this otherwise excellent book

Very nearly a cyberpunk genre defining classic, but that crown has to go to Gibson's Neuromancer, 29 Oct 2008
Gangsters, double crosses, hustles, hallucinogenics, neural interfaces, virtual reality: elements of the past and future fused together. Burning Chrome is a drug-fuelled, high-tech, rollercoaster ride in the dark. Packed with fragmented sentences and jargon, Burning Chrome is not an easy read, but a compelling one. These stories will not be to everyone's likening. They are a difficult read, packed with unpleasant characters in uncomfortable situations. Sometimes there is a lesson to be learned, but generally only the winning matters. They are as beguiling as a car crash. In some other books, the future is bright. In Burning Chrome, it may be orange but it is dark and scary. Inhabited with gangsters committing high-tech crimes or bio-terrorism, this is not a pleasant place to be.

Gibson's aggressive poetry is brutally beautiful. The prose is fragmented; quantum. Perception jumps. Vision blurs as if through a drugged haze. Jargon real and invented beguile and bamboozle. Gibson himself, like Philip K Dick, was no stranger to narcotics and his experience is made flesh in these stories. Published in magazines between 1977 and 84, these stories came at the start of the revolution in popular computing and a sea change in science fiction. The cyberpunk stories of Gibson and his collaborators threw out the shiny futures and political dystopias, and brought in a new dystopian vision where mega-corporations and organised crime ruled (though sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference). These stories are not Star Trek, but criminals with computers; lock, stock and two smoking hard drives. The future has brought technology but it has not cured us of the sins of humanity; it has only enabled new ones.

This is classic cyberpunk in bite-sized portions.

THERE ARE NO MAPS FOR THESE QUICKSILVER TERRITORIES, 27 Sep 2007
It can be stated that it is worthy for one to learn English only to be able to read NEW ROSE HOTEL in the original. No translation can do justice to Gibson's fresh prose. I realize that the cannon-setters might not agree, however, for me, these are the BEST 28 pages ever written in English. With Gibson SF entered its Golden Age.

All of the short stories contained are excellent. However, my favorites are all of the three Sprawl ones: JOHNY MNEMONIC, NEW ROSE HOTEL and BURNING CHROME; at par is the Soviet retro (nowadays) HINTERLANDS.

Never before or since have I came upon comparable poetic dreamscapes of futuristic noir dystopia. The images are so concentrated they just burst from the reader's mind to create a detailed alternative reality. And it is not that the Novels are diluted - they are just more of the good stuff!

My advice: read BURNING CHROME *AFTER* the famous trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive. They will help you understand the precursor ideas for the rich atmospheric world that followed.
[Do not watch the NEW ROSE HOTEL movie. Do so for JOHNY MNEMONIC neither. They do no justice to these literature gems].

Highly Recommended!

Recommended -- but with reservations., 22 Dec 2001
William Gibson is best known as the author of Neuromancer -- his first novel, which caused him to be hailed in  The Sunday Times as "the information age's resident populist prophet".
The book reviewed here is a collection of ten short stories, including his first published story Fragments of a Hologram Rose from 1977.

Gibson's style has been described as "a combination of low-life and high-tech". This collection shows how perceptive he can be in observing both. Gibson doesn't just use technology as a back-drop or to provide props; he considers the effects that developments in technology might have upon individuals and societies. In Johnny Mnemonic for example a character explains:--

"We're an information economy. They teach you that at school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified."

Gibson describes also the detail of low-life settings. In this collection there are very good descriptions of different types of bars in The Belonging Kind. He paints portraits of different characters, Deke in Dogfight, Lese in The Winter Market, with different colours and shades.

Ultimately, however, he extrapolates from a mass (or media) consciousness of the present. Gibson has interesting things to say but he is not a prophet. The future will not be the same as his stories. The Soviet Union has not dominated space research (as in Red Star, Winter Orbit), in fact it no longer exists. Many future developments will derive not from mass actions or popular consciousness, but from the work of "outsiders". Instead of looking just at what is now considered "central", perhaps he should view what is emerging at the edge....

A collection that you must not miss., 27 May 2001
This collection contains ten stories, seven of which are solo works by William Gibson and the other three are collaborations. Nine appeared previously between 1977 and 1985 and one was new for this collection.

Gibson writes hard, technical cyber-punk SF with the art of a real master of the short story genre. Good SF shorts are of course all about ideas, situations and snappy plot twists but great examples of this genre also pack in characters that you can understand and root for and worlds that come to life in your head. It is hard to do that and only a handful of writers can turn out work of this quality.

The opening shot in the book, "Johnny Mnemonic" is one of those rare tales that burns its way into your head. Reading it is almost like being there watching the events unfold. The narrative makes the outlandish grunge-tech future come to life and it is easy to see how this tale inspired the making of a movie.

It is a powerful start and the rest of the book does not disappoint. From the anonymous barfly world of "The Belonging Kind", up into the dying orbit of an old Russian space station in "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and back to the seedy hacker world of "Burning Chrome" Gibson delivers a set of tales for which the phrase "assault on the senses" is no exaggeration.

The book is a fine introduction to both Gibson and the cyber-punk genre and it is a book that every SF fan should own and re-read regularly. If you like it and to want to explore similar work, I'd suggest "A Good Old Fashioned Future" by Bruce Sterling, or the "Mirrorshades" anthology.

A great collection of short stories not to be missed, 11 Oct 2000
Gibson gives his best in the hard work of recalling, fixing and arranging moments in short, moving and touchy stories. Great stories like "Burning Chrome", "Fragments of a hologram rose", "Jhonny Mnemonic" or "New Rose Hotel" show the hints of the world he unrolls in his novels, but maybe the most wonderful thing is seeing him at work on completly different styles than usual, like in the astinishing "Hinterand". A great collection, a must to every Gibson-fan.

Razor girl shines, 25 Oct 2007
This along with neuromancer is a showcase for molly. The street samuri comes into her own in this multi layered effort. The sprawl comes alive along with the long reaching tendrils of a long forgotten advisory. All in all a novel light years ahead of it's time.

POETIC DREAMSCAPES OF A DISTOPIC FUTURE...(Part 3), 27 Sep 2007
I have read this masterpiece (together with the other two of the Sprawl series: NEUROMANCER and COUNT ZERO) during my university years, about a decade ago. Since then I have re-read it countless times.

Many a times the third book of a trilogy is published only to fulfill contractual obligations: this is definitely NOT the case here. Every one of those three is a standalone masterpiece.
Sure, the Sprawl trilogy defined cyberspace, wireheads, zaibatsu-controlled society and futuristic discontent. But this is not the reason why one enjoys these novels so much. It is the beautiful poetic language. The syncopated phrases. The direct effect of verbalized brand names. The noir feeling, rare at the time in a SF novel.

William Gibson had already reaped the fame and fortune from his first two novels. In this one you will find his images more bold, his phrases more relaxed and his writing more tight. Absolutely Beautiful!

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

Start with Neuromancer. Then Count Zero. And finally this one.

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

Great conclusion to the trilogy, 21 Jan 2005
It is a tribute to William Gibson that his vision of the near future was interesting enough to sustain three novels without any apparent strain.

If you liked the fir