# Count Zero

![Book cover of Count Zero](/books/covers/count_zero.jpg)

by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/)
Book 2 of [Sprawl](/books/series/sprawl/)
★★★★★

## Review

_Count Zero_, by William Gibson,
is the second book in the _Sprawl_ series. It follows
three strangers---a teenage hacker on his first run, a mercenary hired to
extract a defecting scientist, and an art dealer tracking down mysterious
boxes---as they're pulled into a struggle between zaibatsus, the ultra-rich,
and something stranger.

I've been on a bit of a cyberpunk kick recently. I started [_Snow Crash_](/books/snow_crash/),
then paused and picked up [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) to build the context I'd need to
understand [Stephenson](/books/authors/neal_stephenson/)'s satire. That diversion taught me I
**love** Gibson's writing, so I was excited to
pick up the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) series again.

### Power Revisited

_Count Zero_ takes place 8 years after [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/). It has the same
fast pacing and ideas about power, but it _feels_ more real. The characters
are smaller, just trying to survive in a newly transhuman world. Bobby
Newmark, the eponymous _Count Zero_, is just a teen who _hopes_ to be a cowboy
someday; his first run almost kills him. Case in [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) was _also_
a loser---he's a druggy trying to get the street to kill him because he's too
scared to kill himself---but he _is_ a cowboy, he's good at his job, a vital
part of the team. He's an anti-hero whereas Bobby isn't even that. Marly
Krushkova doesn't have augmented vision or blades in her fingers; she sells
art. Turner, the emotionally damaged mercenary, is the closest to a bad-ass
who would have fit in [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/). But Gibson sets
it up brilliantly: he gives Turner's team backstories, a meticulous plan...
and then blows it away. Everyone's gone, none of their planning mattered. The
characters in _Count Zero_ spend a lot of time in the dirt instead of in
orbit: hiding in abandoned malls, crawling through the Appalachian mountains,
hanging out in the projects. It makes the world feel alive in a way it didn't
in [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/).

[_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) focused on power and its cost, taking us inside the
Tessier-Ashpool dynasty to show how a pursuit of power destroyed their
humanity. _Count Zero_ views the same power from the outside. The zaibatsus
tower over the plot, so high up they can't see the people they're crushing.
Above them is the world's richest man, Josef Virek, dying of some fast-growing
cancer and playing the zaibatsus against each other, trying to find a way to
"jump" to the next evolutionary step. He has already lost his humanity, even
before the jump, as Gibson makes clear when Marly meets
Virek's simstim avatar:

> And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew,
> with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no
> longer even remotely human.

But the heroes, the zaibatsus, and Virek are all human-scale power, even if
they've left their humanity behind. Wintermute and Neuromancer were also on
this scale: they were comprehensible. But at the end of [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) they
merged, and then shattered into incomprehensible, all-powerful things that
live in cyberspace. Gibson handles that incomprehensible
power the way humans have for millennia: religion. The fragments of the AI
appear to the humans as [Loa][lwa] from [Haitian Vodou][vodou]. And they
behave the same way, possessing mortals and riding them.

[lwa]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lwa
[vodou]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Vodou

### Punk Influenced

_Count Zero_ deepens the connection between Gibson's [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) series and [Stephenson](/books/authors/neal_stephenson/)'s [_Snow Crash_](/books/snow_crash/). I had thought [Neal Stephenson](/books/authors/neal_stephenson/) took
[_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) and added mysticism, but now I see it was in Gibson's work all along. Angela's brain was modified
to allow her to connect to the divine, similar to Enki's nam-shub. She speaks
in Haitian Creole when communing with the divine, which other characters liken
to speaking in tongues, just as Rife's followers do. Both use religion as a
parallel system to technology. There are some smaller similarities too: the
pontoon town off LA is like the raft, the slamhound is similar to the rat
thing, the Orthodox Scientologists with Hubbard as a saint are
just like the Pearly Gates franchise with Jesus, Elvis, and Reverend Wayne.

_Count Zero_ reminded me of many other works. Structurally, the helpless
protagonists at the mercy of forces they don't understand recall [Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/)'s [_Echopraxia_](/books/echopraxia/) and [Alex](/books/authors/a_n_alex/)'s [_A Mote in Shadow_](/books/a_mote_in_shadow/). Gibson's trick of investing
you in a story only to rip it away is one [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/) later uses in
[_Matter_](/books/matter/), where a medieval power struggle is suddenly swatted away by a
cosmic horror.

The world-building details are familiar: the zaibatsu-loyalty enzyme acts like
Ketracel-white from _Deep Space Nine_, while the collapsed food chain and krill wafers
are _Soylent Green_. Turner's extraction team, with a cyberspace cowboy
riding shotgun, mirrors the mages in [Williams](/books/authors/walter_jon_williams/)'s [_Metropolitan_](/books/series/metropolitan/) series. The robot dog that blows up Turner in the first
few pages reminded me of Metalhead from _Black Mirror_ or the Hound from
Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_.

Virek's autonomous wealth, sometimes at war with itself, was like the
corporations-as-code in [Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/)'s [_Accelerando_](/books/accelerando/) executing
their owners' (and then their own) intent independently. Bobby and the Loa
pulling off impossible feats in cyberspace reads as a proto-Neo sequence from
_The Matrix_.

I'm always nervous picking up the second book of an author I just discovered,
worried they'll break my heart. _Count Zero_ put those fears to rest. William Gibson writes such short, energetic prose that sweeps me along, and his
character work is extraordinary: everyone feels different, but alive. I'm
looking forward to _Mona Lisa Overdrive_.

## Reviews that mention _Count Zero_
- [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/)†

† _Mentioned via a link to the series._

## Related Books
- [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) --- ★★★★★: Neuromancer, by William Gibson, is the first book in the Sprawl series, and one of the founding texts of cyberpunk. In it, Case, a hacker who can’t jack in anymore, and street samurai Molly Millions are hired by a mysterious ex-special forces agent to pull off a heist.
- [_Snow Crash_](/books/snow_crash/) by [Neal Stephenson](/books/authors/neal_stephenson/) --- ★★★★☆: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, is a satirical cyberpunk novel set in a near-future America where the federal government has collapsed and everything—pizza, religion, neighborhoods, national defense—is run by competing franchises. It follows Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and pizza delivery driver, and Y.T., a teenage skateboard courier, as they uncover a conspiracy to reprogram the human mind.
- [_Echopraxia_](/books/echopraxia/) by [Peter Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/) --- ★★★★★: Echopraxia, by Peter Watts, is the second book in the Firefall series, unfolding at roughly the same time as Blindsight. It follows parasitologist Daniel Brüks, who gets unwillingly dragged into a conflict between multiple transhuman factions, travels to the Icarus station orbiting the sun, and eventually back to Earth.