Just Finished re-Reading: Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (FP: 1988) [316pp] 

A Corporate War was coming. To protect her as much as possible, Kumiko Yanaka has been sent to freezing London in the care of her father’s ‘business associate’ and a state-of-the-art mobile AI called Colin. Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic a group of misfits hiding out in an industrial contamination zone have been tasked to hide a comatose hacker connected to a medical gurney and enough computing power to hold an entire world and more. Enter Sally, AKA Molly, a soldier, street samurai, agent for hire. She’s being blackmailed to kidnap the biggest star in the Matrix for purposes unknown. The blackmailer is the ‘ghost’ of a deceased billionaire who refuses to accept the reality of her own demise. Within the Matrix itself things move in the data streams. Things that have only just emerged, things with their own powers and own agenda, Things that have done something that will change EVERYTHING. 

This is the 3rd volume in the Sprawl trilogy. I first read it around the time of publication when Gibson was blowing my mind with possibilities. Strangely I found the first 100 pages a bit slow – but that might just be me these days – character building with a bit of world building thrown in. Most of the world building had been supplied in the first 2 novels so it wasn’t really required to do much more. A few of the characters from the previous book appeared (including the great character of Molly with her implanted mirror-specs) although they mostly played subsidiary roles here. The story REALLY picked up after page 100 when several revelations dropped which not only changed the speed of the narrative but its overall tone too. Although the closing revelation didn’t have quite the same impact on a 2nd reading, I do remember being totally FLOORED by it the 1st time around. It was a heck of a cliffhanger that has, as yet, not been resolved in any of the authors other novels – I'll leave you to think on how good or bad that idea is! 

Set in the ‘near’ future – it's hard to say exactly when – it's always amusing to see what predictions came true and what was missed. Here we have self-drive cars, instant access to information, laptops (called decks), smart clothes, orbital factories, the casual (if expensive) use of intercontinental supersonic flight, but NO mobile phones. There was one mention of Wi-Fi (as well as how expensive it was) but not a single cell phone. WEIRD! Although this is probably my least favourite of the trilogy – the 2nd book is my favourite – this is still a very good cyberpunk novel and has rightly part of a well-earned classic trilogy. You don’t have to read them in chronological order as they are only loosely connected but I’d recommend that you do so. Recommended to all SF lovers and especially those interested in the Cyberpunk sub-genre.