# Mona Lisa Overdrive

![Book cover of Mona Lisa Overdrive](/books/covers/mona_lisa_overdrive.jpg)

by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/)
Book 3 of [Sprawl](/books/series/sprawl/)
★★★★★

## Review

_Mona Lisa Overdrive_, by William Gibson,
is the third and final book in the _Sprawl_ series. It
brings together characters from both previous books---Molly, Angela, Bobby,
and the ghost of 3Jane---around a device that can hold the entirety of
cyberspace, and maybe a human soul.

The first two books of the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) series are both thrillers about surviving in
a post-human world of AI and mega-corporations, but each is subtly different:
[_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) is about bad-asses in space; [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/) is about
normal people encountering the seemingly divine. I wasn't sure what _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ would be. It could have been a third variation. Instead, it ties
both together, capping off their storylines.

Bobby bridges the two most clearly. In [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/) he's the anti-Case---a
teen playing at being a cowboy, nearly killed on his first run. But by _Mona Lisa Overdrive_, he becomes a mind fully in cyberspace, body left behind in a
coma: exactly where Case was headed in the first book. Molly returns from [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) and _Johnny Mnemonic_, the same no-nonsense street samurai.
Angela, whose modified brain was a key plot point in [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/), is now
the world's biggest simstim star. And there's Slick, a new character but a
familiar archetype: an artist assembling junk into memory-preserving robots in
the wastelands of New Jersey. Gibson brings these four
threads together, and in doing so answers a question the trilogy set up from
the beginning.

### What Remains

Each book in the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) series asks a different question. [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/):
what do you lose when you become more than human? It's about the body: Case
hates his, Molly has transformed hers, Linda loses hers but is saved within
the Neuromancer AI. [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/): what does inhuman power look like from
below? It asks how humans understand transhuman beings; its answer is
"religion". _Mona Lisa Overdrive_: what remains of you when your body is left
behind? It synthesizes the other two: it's about memory, or, fitting with the
religious parallels, soul.

This theme starts in [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) with Dixie Flatline, the mindstate of a
dead hacker stored in ROM, and with Tessier-Ashpool's Neuromancer AI, which
was designed to store human consciousnesses. In _Mona Lisa Overdrive_, memory is
everywhere. The Finn is now a construct like Flatline, but mixed with the
religion of [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/): the locals treat him as an oracle and leave
Vodou offerings. Slick has short-term memory loss imposed as part of his
punishment. The Yakuza keep their former bosses' consciousnesses in cubes to
consult. Kumiko's ghost boy has had his memory altered, with parts added that
he'll need to keep her safe. And finally, The Count, Angela, and 3Jane are
using the Aleph---a computer that contains a simulation of the entire world,
based on Borges's _The Aleph_---to "catch their souls" and
store them.

Complementing the theme of memory is _[gomi][gomi_link]_, which is how Kumiko
refers to all the antiques, knickknacks, and clutter that litter England, a
sunsetting empire clinging to its past through objects. These are the memory
of the real world. Tokyo is built on layers and layers of _gomi_. Slick's
factory sits in the New Jersey Solitude, a toxic dump; he takes pieces of that
_gomi_ and makes kinetic sculptures that help him retain his memory. In [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/), Tessier-Ashpool hoards that past, cutting it to pieces and
filing it away in Straylight without reason; in [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/) the box-maker
robot sorts through the refuse and creates art; in _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ 3Jane has
gone from physical to virtual: cramming the entire world into the Aleph.

[gomi_link]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%B4%E3%83%9F

### Influences

Throughout the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) series, Gibson has explored the
separation of body and mind, and which part---if any---is really you. In his
work, some copies are real---Bobby and Angela in the Aleph, Linda in
Neuromancer---while others are tools made of souls: Flatline, the Finn, the
Yakuza cubes. The difference is memory. Bobby can remember; the tools have no
continuity. That question is common in sci-fi: [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/) handles it
in [_Surface Detail_](/books/surface_detail/) and [_Look to Windward_](/books/look_to_windward/), where computers record
souls to torture them or to save them. In [Simmons](/books/authors/dan_simmons/)'s [_Hyperion_](/books/hyperion/), the cybrid Keats dies and becomes fully virtual. In [Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/)'s
[_Accelerando_](/books/accelerando/) and [Rajaniemi](/books/authors/hannu_rajaniemi/)'s [_Jean le Flambeur_](/books/series/jean_le_flambeur/), minds
are copied, split, merged. In [Taylor](/books/authors/dennis_e_taylor/)'s [_Bobiverse_](/books/series/bobiverse/), a copy
is you for the moment but becomes its own thing. And [qntm](/books/authors/qntm/) shows the
possible horrors of putting a mind in a computer in [_Lena_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/#lena) and [_Driver_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/#driver).

_Mona Lisa Overdrive_ reminded me of many other works. The Aleph is like an
inversion of _The Matrix_: the entire world virtualized, but for Bobby
it's an escape instead of the prison it is for Neo. The way history has a
physicality in layers of gomi is similar to how the weight of history is
represented by the pale in [_Disco Elysium_](/books/disco_elysium/), although the pale erases while
gomi builds. The combined Neuromancer+Wintermute AI waking up and immediately
discovering another matrix is like Colossus discovering the Soviet AI Guardian
in _Colossus: The Forbin Project_ (based on Jones's _Colossus_).
3Jane's scheme executing autonomously after her death is like the
self-directed corporations in [Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/)'s [_Accelerando_](/books/accelerando/).

The details are familiar too: the Gentleman Loser bar where hackers hang out
reminds me of the Black Sun in [Stephenson](/books/authors/neal_stephenson/)'s [_Snow Crash_](/books/snow_crash/).
Angela's mind containing 2 personalities is like Susan Bates with her 3 in [Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/)'s [_Blindsight_](/books/blindsight/). The modular buildings where Mona gets her
surgery are reminiscent of the stacks in Cline's _Ready Player One_. The jive hand signs are similar to the pronoun waves in
[Alex](/books/authors/a_n_alex/)'s [_A Mote in Shadow_](/books/a_mote_in_shadow/).

Gibson does an amazing thing with the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) series: he
makes each book original, but still clearly part of a greater whole. Each one
asks a different question about power, the body, and the mind. I originally
picked up [_Neuromancer_](/books/neuromancer/) in order to better understand [_Snow Crash_](/books/snow_crash/),
but I didn't expect to find a new favorite author. I'm looking forward to
reading more of his work, starting with _Burning Chrome_, the
short story collection where the [_Sprawl_](/books/series/sprawl/) began.

## Reviews that mention _Mona Lisa Overdrive_
- [_Count Zero_](/books/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.
- [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/) by [William Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/) --- ★★★★★: 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.
- [_Accelerando_](/books/accelerando/) by [Charles Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/) --- ★★☆☆☆: Accelerando, by Charles Stross, is a hard sci-fi fix-up novel. Originally published as 9 separate stories, it follows 3 generations of the Macx family as they upload, fork, merge, and scatter across a solar system slowly being converted into computronium.