Mona Lisa Overdrive

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by William Gibson

Book 3 of the Sprawl series

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 series are both thrillers about surviving in a post-human world of AI and mega-corporations, but each is subtly different: Neuromancer is about bad-asses in space; 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 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 and Johnny Mnemonic, the same no-nonsense street samurai. Angela, whose modified brain was a key plot point in 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 series asks a different question. 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: 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 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: 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, 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, Tessier-Ashpool hoards that past, cutting it to pieces and filing it away in Straylight without reason; in 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.

Influences

Throughout the 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 handles it in Surface Detail and Look to Windward, where computers record souls to torture them or to save them. In Simmons’s Hyperion, the cybrid Keats dies and becomes fully virtual. In Stross’s Accelerando and Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeur, minds are copied, split, merged. In Taylor’s Bobiverse, a copy is you for the moment but becomes its own thing. And qntm shows the possible horrors of putting a mind in a computer in Lena and 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, 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’s Accelerando.

The details are familiar too: the Gentleman Loser bar where hackers hang out reminds me of the Black Sun in Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Angela’s mind containing 2 personalities is like Susan Bates with her 3 in Watts’s 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’s A Mote in Shadow.

Gibson does an amazing thing with the 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 in order to better understand 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 began.