Count Zero

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by William Gibson

Book 2 of the Sprawl series

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, then paused and picked up Neuromancer to build the context I’d need to understand Stephenson’s satire. That diversion taught me I love Gibson’s writing, so I was excited to pick up the Sprawl series again.

Power Revisited

Count Zero takes place 8 years after 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 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. 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.

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 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 from Haitian Vodou. And they behave the same way, possessing mortals and riding them.

Punk Influenced

Count Zero deepens the connection between Gibson’s Sprawl series and Stephenson’s Snow Crash. I had thought Neal Stephenson took 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’s Echopraxia and Alex’s A Mote in Shadow. Gibson’s trick of investing you in a story only to rip it away is one Banks later uses in 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’s 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’s 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.