Reviews and Comments

So this review is going to be very spoilery so please just go read the book; start with other Gibson books (like Burning Chrome, which is referenced and spoiled here in Count Zero) before this one, though, unless you really want to jump in the deep end first.

This is the kind of book that makes me happy all day because I know I'm soon going to get to get back to reading it. Like "Lalala I'm washing the dishes and existence is pain but that's okay because soon I'm gonna get to sit down for a few chapters of Count Zero so it's a good day."

Just iconic genre fun like a good super hero comic. Yeah, yeah, there are issues of Spider-Man that are like truly profound but I wouldn't be reading Spidey if it weren't for how just the average day of swinging webs and hanging out with Felicia and Jonah is just inherently fun.

Count Zero is the second book in the Sprawl trilogy but some of the short stories in Burning Chrome is also set in that world and my reco would be to start there. The Sprawl books were notoriously dense with its own lingo of slang and brand names, both of them both real and made up, and had a reputation of being hard to understand back in the day.

Maybe that reputation wasn't entirely unearned because just look at how much the back copy of my edition got wrong. Even the publisher's apparently didn't really know what they had on their hands. Buckle up for spoilers for the first several chapters:

Hallucination by consensus

Okay, maybe that's fine, an improvement even. The line in the book is "consensual hallucination" as a sort of Stanisław Lem–like metaphor for the internet in a book that came out six years after Usenet and the same year that IETF was founded. (Hold on, I shouldn't be so 1986 about it because Burning Chrome was 1981 and that's where a lot of the themes were already established.)

When the Angels pulled Count Zeor out of the matrix there wasn't much left of him. The centipede did a good job on his face though—and now Two-a-Day was going to let him in on the really big stuff…

He gets pulled out of the matrix by someone else, which is one of the mysteries the book gradually reveals—and that's part of why I love Gibson's books so much; the framework is super weird but it's not the tension driver, there are always real and clear stakes and mysteries. Sometimes cheap McGuffin's like the clip in Pattern Recognition or the goggles in Virtual Light or the boxes, job, and mysterious saviour here, but it works.

Then he gets cut up IRL by some gangers and that state of being bleeding out on the pavement is what the Angels (Rhea and Jackie) pull him out of. Much to the consternation of Two-a-Day; it's not him that's "letting" Count Zero in on anything voluntarily.

And the centipede fixes up Count Zero's back and chest, not face.

Unlike Turner:

Turner woke up in a new body with a beautiful woman beside him. They let him recuperate for a while in Mexico, then Hosaka reactivated his memory for the most dangerous mission of all: to make Mitchell defect from Maas Biolabs…

Yep, he more or less does get a new body but then he decides on his own to go to Mexico and he meets Allison there. And while she's beautiful, the limited third person narration (yeah I know…) makes a point of how she isn't the cookie-cutter model type he's usually been hooking up with. And while it's a surprise reveal late first chapter that she's a field psych on retainer for Hosaka, Turner isn't shown to have had his memory "inactive". They show up and bring him in for a job; not to "make" (convince) Mitchell to defect, but to bring him in safely since he is trying to defect.

It seemed that the rich had long ceased to be recognisably human. Like Virek, whose body was suspendend in a vat somewhere while his hologram told Marly that he wanted her to find some Art Works for him. And that she was on the payroll for life…

(CW body horror for this part.) Suspended less like a person floating in a bacta tank and more like how a sugar cube is "suspended" in hot coffee cell by cell.

The capitalization of "Art Works" is def on this back copy writer and what Virek wants is the artist that made them. Marly's only on payroll for that one mission. "On the payroll for life" sounds so ominous but when reading the book (I read the book before I read the back copy, which I always waint until last, since some books, like Vian's L'Automne à Pékin, spoil the entire ending on the back copy, which I think is bad practice but unfortunately common enough. Yeah, yeah, this review is pretty spoileriffic too but my reviews aren't as much meant as pre-reading consumer guidance as they are, uh, ways for me to reflect on what I've read and what I like and don't like about it, and what writers can learn from it) I actually thought "wait she's on all-expenses-paid on very expensive and luxurious mission but what about her own future after the mission is done? Does she get salary or a reward fee or something?"

Also (but this is a nitpick among nitpicks) in the novel's setting, holograms (which project into IRL, for ads or religious iconography or porn) are distinct from the type of brain-local simstim Virek appears through.

In the matrix of cyberspace—where zaibatsus fought it out for world domination and the computer jocks risked their minds scuffling for fat crumbs—the lives of three human beigs were inextricably scrambled.

Okay, this was the last paragraph of the back copy and it's pretty accurate. No notes. I love the redudancy of "in the matrix of cyberspace" so much. It's actually weird to me how in the novel, cyberspace a.k.a. the matrix (both terms are used interchangeably) is simultaneously this vast giga space of a bajillion users, while also being something that only hotdoggers and cowboys can go on (at one point Count Zero gets hold up three hours in customs just for the audacity of having a means to go online with), while also being explicitly geographic. You need to literally fly around in there in some low-rez Vectrex game with electrodes on your head. You can't just type in alt.cyberpunk and teleport there. And that ginormous world is so small so you might accidentally end up in LA when you're heading to Japan and you always run into people you know on there like elephants in a phonebooth.

Another indication that this book might've been more than the publisher could handle was that there are a lot of small errors (in my 1987 paperback copy) like a "two" that should've been a "too", a "however" that became a "whoever", inconsistent capitalization, and things like that that would've slipped through a spellcheck and an overwhelmed, zonked-out, future-shocked editor. This book must've been a mind bomb for 'em!

It sounds like I'm making fun of the book and I am a little—I can't help it, it's so fun, this world of broadcast simstim, telefaxes, newsloops, music cassettes, and mono-molecule everything, written in an era before CDs and Netscape, but there's really a lot to seriously like here, too. Everyone's in a while you find these fun anachronisms (which Gibson himself caricatured with such precision in The Gernsback Continuum), postcards from a world that could've been but wasn't, but that's not the brunt of the text.

Okay, yeah, references are the brunt of the text but they're of four kinds:

• Stuff that actually is super relevant to our current day, sort of
• Stuff that hasn't happened yet but might still (like space travel and referring to a spark gun as "old-fashioned")
• Stuff that sort of did happen, kind of
• And then the "predictions" that just ended up outright wrong and that are so easy to make fun of and are so amusing

So while yes, the main "plot" of the novel is a distant second to cramming in a zillion references a minute, but those references ar e a delight because only a tiny li'l mini fraction of them are in that fourth "wrong guess" category (and they're much more fun than they are annoying). Gibson didn't set out to only be a futurologist. This is a novel, and it does work as novel with great character work and real tension drivers, and it also works as poetry with these dense sentences in a language all his own.

There's only a few crumbs that get stuck like how Jackie has decorated her hair with antique resistors; beats like that come across as a fetishization of tech that's uncharacteristic of the rest of the novel.

The latter Pattern Recognition (one of my favorite books of all time) is in many ways a remake of the Marly section of Count Zero. Excentric curator gets sponsored by even excentricer ultra rich but problematic guy to find anonymous creator of tightly curated art where the journey is more interesting than the destination. Not that either book is a shaggy-dog exactly; there is an interesting-enough pot of gold at the end of these rainbows but in both cases, the real treasure is the friends we made along the way. (And I need to go on AO3 to search for Marly/Rez ship fics.)

In the case of Count Zero, that might be underselling it a little because I really did think that was a beautiful and curious and interesting revelation scene for the artist at work, marred a little by (spoiler for dumb ending detail but it's not the whole thing) Virek's completely misguided attempt to somehow upload into a computer.

I also almost never get bugged by characters making mistakes like I'm not the one to shout "nooo don't go into the basement" when watching a horror movie because usually I'm myself slow-witted enough to be three steps behind the movie characters so I never think of realizing that they're making mistakes, so it's a rare exception that here I felt that Marly's policy of not reading the provided reports because they might "interfere with my intuition" got annoying after that policy had blown up for the second time and it kept blowing up a couple of more times after that until it through a couple of ex machinas stopped blowing up. I was like "okay yeah you've learned by now that those reports have some pretty vital info so read them now please". I get that the policy from an authorial standpoint was great because it made us get the highlights as infodumps from side characters instead of like how in Rice's latter The Witching Hour there's "read this report please" followed by a couple of hundred pages of the actual report that the reader has to slog through, so I'm glad Gibson tried something else here, but it started putting a starin on both the story's credibility and Marly's likeability.

Conclusion: a banger book that I absolutely loved and will probably reread many times. My reco is, and I hope this doesn't come across as gatekeeping because if you wanna dive in here you can, is to instead start with other Gibsons, like the Burning Chrome short tsory that's featured in the collection of the same name, or books from the Bridge trilogy or the Blue Ant trilogy, but if you have, then this is another great one.

Let's sail all the way out to the sea to a tiny speck of an island where we can explicate and externalize and incarnate our hitherto unspoken grawing worries and fears, Liminalize the subliminal, break on through to the other side, scratch and breach the subdermal in a land of shortening days and dwindling lamp oil.

That's what the Moomin family does in this 1965 classic, penultimate in the Moomin series and sort of a sister book to the 1970 Moominvalley in November. At least, that's how I always thought of it because the Moomin books, the eight illustrated prose novels (well, one of them, the best one, is a short story collection) are presented as one set, the full-on picture books as one set, and the comics (Newspaper strips) as one set.

These last two books really feel like her bookend on the Moomin series, and her own run on the comics are all from in between the previous books and she had passed that baton by the time of Moominpappa at Sea, but I think one or two of the picture books are actually later. I should make an "intertwined timeline" at one point mostly for my own benifit so I can see where each comic storyline was published in between which novel and so on.

I had read one or two of the Moomin books as a very young girl but when I was twelve I checked out the entire set from the library and read them more coherently. These two last books (this one is the seventh out of eight) really felt like a "aargh, to heck with this! Let's twist the dagger in this series" sort of like The Silver Chair is to the Narnia series.

And as I told some of y'all the other day, this book was always the scariest and creepiest to me for how it's liminal, how it's twilight to the last book, Moominvalley in November being full dark no stars and easier to understand and grasp and dive into, especially after having made it through this one.

But the sea isn't just dark and drowning. It's also glistening and sparkling and fresh. There is a dawn after this twilight and the way it's set up and delivered is note by note perfect. This book can be your map through the dusk and into the new and unhurried, unworried life. A timeless classic.

It's just coindence that I wrapped up two 1965 books just after one another, this and The Drought. Both similarly liminal and would make great companion pieces for each other.

So The Drought, from 1965. I loved The Crystal World and I love how different this is. Crystal World came after but is absolutely no retread. Ballard grows as an author in my appreciation for creating two masterpieces that are so different from each other. That'd be like if Mondrian had also made The Last Supper in between his haunting plastic visions.

Years ago I bought a box of a hundred postcards depicting paper back covers. The four that made the biggest impression on me were a collection of Heine poems with a mindblowing op art cover, Iris McCullough's A Severed Head with that just-manic-enough stare, and the contrasting dichotomy of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and The Drought. I always wanted to read them. Turned out that it's not just two books, it's an entire series. I managed to read The Crystal World a few years ago, in Swedish; this copy of The Drought was in English.

The fact that it's in English meant it was rough going at first since I had been spoiled of reading a whole bunch of novels in Swedish lately. I read way slower in English (not that I'm that good at Swedish either). It was also rough going because of how bleak it is and how close to home it hits in this era of climate desolation and stubborn denial. We're currently living in The Burning World and our World Leaders are still pouring gallons of gasoline on those flames.

J. G. Ballard crams his prose ful of comparisons. Everything is like something else. Sometimes it just falls flat and looks dumb like when mud looks like lava or whatever but often it adds to the experience more often than not. One of my faves is an early description of how car drivers are throwing their cigarettes out the window as they're crossing the bridge and that act of poisonous littering looks somehow beautiful.

That's a theme for the entire novel. Making ugly things beautiful and vice versa. There's a "drowned" aquarium (an aquarium where the water hasn't been changed) and the tropical fish are fraying like gossamer. It's a meditative and enriching read.

That's why it stings so much that the main character is such a racist, ableist, ageist, and cissexist (and initially fatphobic but he gets over that). Some of the secondary progragonists are African American, old, hydrocephalic, blind, or (shock horror) female, and the third-person narration never shies away from expressing that in slurs. Not only through slurs for those particular groups (but there's a lot of that) but also "collateral slurs" like one of the worst words for Artic First Nations women that someone else gets compared to.

I wonder if it had been more palatable if this book instead just had been a first person account by this Dr Ransom main character because the third person voice makes it seems like the author himself is down with the sickness. The choice of third person is effective when it comes to barfing forth apocalyptica (and yes the book makes me wanna run TRPGs) in all its ugly beauty, and the book has three parts and each part starts more "zoomed out" and the third-person-ness makes that seamless; it can describe the lay of the land and then jump right onto the shoulder of a PoV char. But I have no idea of knowing that. Maybe it would be even worse.

And maybe this is just J. G. Ballard's own language of blood purity and strong river men coming at us through the ages. It's been sixty years since the book was written but I would hope that even then this would've been beyond the pale.

The particular flavor of apocalypse is haunting and timeless. I was lightly teasing Count Zero the other day for its telefaxes and rooftop antennae (all in good fun because that one does seems like a marvelous books) but this has almost nothing like that. I never get jarred awake from "this could happen". Okay yeah one thing: mosquitos would decrease in number during a drought, not increase. But that's just one sentence.

I'm giving this book a strong reco if you can stomach the assorted slurs. I'm not excusing them or saying "it was a different time"—the book would 100% have been better without them. But there's enough "here" here in the location work and themes that carries the book into an unforgettable nightmare that our noble leaders are dragging us towards in real life.

Whoops forgot to add this one; my current audiobook after Star Diaries. Listening to the Swedish version read by Alma Pöysti. Not part of the "pile of 26 books". Also not sure why I put myself through this one the most depressing of the Moomin books. It's that chafing awkward twilight anxiety of going to hell in a cozy fuzzy handbasket. I love Moominvalley in November which is full dark no stars. "One knows where one has that one" as the expression goes. This one, its predecessor (and the two really are sister books, a duology subset of the greater Moomin canon), is chafingly liminal by comparison. Am I gonna reco it and give it five starts when this reread is done? Heck yes it's a literary masterpiece and Janson is one of the greats for me up there among Shirley Jackson and Karin Boye and Irmelin Sandman Lilius and William Gibson. But when I have a shef full of moomins why did I have to pick this one the most eerie and anxiety-inducing and unfun one? Well because SR aired the audio book version for free a few months back and I snarfed it and didn't get around to it until now.

Okay so the problem with this book is that it's way too gruesome for me. It's got pythonesque body horror and torture gags and execution humor with an absolutely dumb premise (a fake treasure island meant to lure victimes to an executioner's school to practice on). Now, I know that that kind of crazy humor was massively popular at one point in like the fifties sixties and seventies. Harvey Kurtzmann, the previously mentioned Monthy Python, Itchy & Scratchy. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying I'm not into it. If you thought Escape from Monkey Island (the fourth game with all the prosthetics gags) was the best in the series, chase down this book. But for me, that kind of stuff detracts from the book and I really have to squint at the corners to find stuff to like here. And when I do, then yes. Adventure, high seas, amazing location work, Jason's perfect sense of comic timing. The corpse-and-torture gags are just a couple of spoonfuls of poisons in an otherwise wonderful brew that whets my appetite for more of the classic adventure genre.

So yes, great book once you look past the worst 60% or so of it.

Recos for better adventure stuff: the Monkey Island games (the good ones), the Alphabet Squadron series, the Count of Monte Cristo, The Beetle. Hmm, I'm realizing that even my "recos" are pretty lacking; for a genre I love there's not a lot of good books in it yet. Yeah, yeah, the Princess Bride... but can't we do even better? I really long for that sense of wonder.

Recos for better Jason: Why Are You Doing This? (Although he has a lot of really good ones.)