Saturday, 5 September 2020 09:26 pm
Book Review: Mona Lisa Overdrive
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deckardcanineI didn't care much for William Gibson's Neuromancer 12 years ago, but I thought that was partly because I hadn't rightly prepared my mind for it. Besides, this threequel was popular enough to lend its title to two songs and an album (three parties total). When I saw it on a giveaway shelf, I wondered: Would I like it considerably better than the first entry or not?
One key difference is that former protagonist Henry Case is absent and barely gets a mention. Now there are multiple focal characters, mercifully switched only with new chapters. The four main ones are as follows:
-Kumiko is at least 11 years old and, judging from how she behaves and how others treat her, not much older. Her Yakuza crime lord father sends her from Tokyo to London for her safety, but she doesn't utterly trust everyone around her. She relies heavily on a portable device that lets an informative A.I. companion, Colin, appear to her privately. I appreciate Kumiko for being the most innocent person in a punk realm (even if the other focal characters are also more ethical than Case) and for lending a simple perspective to a complex story.
-Slick Henry (yes, another Henry) is an artistic engineer in an American slum, plagued by periods of short-term memory loss thanks to a discontinued penal system experiment. Someone who once saved his life now calls on him to use technology to take care of a man who's barely physically alive but must be quite active in a VR complex called the Matrix, which no doubt inspired the Wachowskis. Slick doesn't know nearly enough details, but he can rightly assume someone dangerous is looking for the guy. Meanwhile, Slick's de facto landlord, with more technical expertise, gets curious and then obsessed with what there is to learn.
-Angie Mitchell is basically a famed VR porn star, but lately she's been in rehab. I'm not entirely sure it was the drugs that made her a mess; she's had some unusual online experiences that precipitated what she takes to be hallucinations of voodoo gods. Anyway, she wants to get back to work, but someone else wants to kidnap her, presumably to wicked ends.
-Mona Lisa is a 16-year-old druggie prostitute whose admires and reportedly resembles Angie. That last point is not entirely good for her or her companions.
As you can see, there's a fair amount of female representation this time around. Those aren't the only major ladies, either. Slick gets help from a former nurse in training who came with the comatose fellow. A reclusive female industrialist becomes the closest thing to a clear main villain. I immediately took a liking to Sally, who, not coincidentally, reminded me of Molly from Neuromancer. Sally seems to do the most to tie the focal characters' stories together.
Alas, it took much too long for that to happen. By page 100, hardly any plot had materialized; by page 200, I was just beginning to see how any events might coalesce. If anything, the series has gotten even harder to follow than before. That may stem partly from not having read the interim Count Zero, but a synopsis suggests that that would clarify only a few aspects. The threequel's not as shoehorned in as that of the Space Trilogy, but the connections are still pretty tenuous.
Certainly Gibson's writing style didn't get any more comprehensible. Never mind the choppy amnesia episodes; some late segments switch from past to present tense, evidently to suggest something about the focal character's state. More obnoxiously, chapters tend not to identify the focal character by name up front, even when we're meeting them for the first time. You might have to wait until someone talks to them on the next page. There's no intriguing reason to keep us guessing. Maybe Gibson was trying to evoke the sensation of being stoned, even in Kumiko's chapters, but it feels more like "Nyah nyah, I know something you don't know!"
And what I could follow wasn't much fun. Characters rarely enjoy themselves in the least, and the ending is once again creepy and morally bankrupt. Colin's not too bad as the A.I.s go, but I still find his abilities pretty hard to accept.
I expect never to pick up CZ. Probably nothing else from Gibson either. He's been one mostly bad trip after another for me.
In the interest of chasing a gritty adult book with something kid-friendly, I've started Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. How appropriate to begin and, I predict, end in September, which is the protagonist's name.
One key difference is that former protagonist Henry Case is absent and barely gets a mention. Now there are multiple focal characters, mercifully switched only with new chapters. The four main ones are as follows:
-Kumiko is at least 11 years old and, judging from how she behaves and how others treat her, not much older. Her Yakuza crime lord father sends her from Tokyo to London for her safety, but she doesn't utterly trust everyone around her. She relies heavily on a portable device that lets an informative A.I. companion, Colin, appear to her privately. I appreciate Kumiko for being the most innocent person in a punk realm (even if the other focal characters are also more ethical than Case) and for lending a simple perspective to a complex story.
-Slick Henry (yes, another Henry) is an artistic engineer in an American slum, plagued by periods of short-term memory loss thanks to a discontinued penal system experiment. Someone who once saved his life now calls on him to use technology to take care of a man who's barely physically alive but must be quite active in a VR complex called the Matrix, which no doubt inspired the Wachowskis. Slick doesn't know nearly enough details, but he can rightly assume someone dangerous is looking for the guy. Meanwhile, Slick's de facto landlord, with more technical expertise, gets curious and then obsessed with what there is to learn.
-Angie Mitchell is basically a famed VR porn star, but lately she's been in rehab. I'm not entirely sure it was the drugs that made her a mess; she's had some unusual online experiences that precipitated what she takes to be hallucinations of voodoo gods. Anyway, she wants to get back to work, but someone else wants to kidnap her, presumably to wicked ends.
-Mona Lisa is a 16-year-old druggie prostitute whose admires and reportedly resembles Angie. That last point is not entirely good for her or her companions.
As you can see, there's a fair amount of female representation this time around. Those aren't the only major ladies, either. Slick gets help from a former nurse in training who came with the comatose fellow. A reclusive female industrialist becomes the closest thing to a clear main villain. I immediately took a liking to Sally, who, not coincidentally, reminded me of Molly from Neuromancer. Sally seems to do the most to tie the focal characters' stories together.
Alas, it took much too long for that to happen. By page 100, hardly any plot had materialized; by page 200, I was just beginning to see how any events might coalesce. If anything, the series has gotten even harder to follow than before. That may stem partly from not having read the interim Count Zero, but a synopsis suggests that that would clarify only a few aspects. The threequel's not as shoehorned in as that of the Space Trilogy, but the connections are still pretty tenuous.
Certainly Gibson's writing style didn't get any more comprehensible. Never mind the choppy amnesia episodes; some late segments switch from past to present tense, evidently to suggest something about the focal character's state. More obnoxiously, chapters tend not to identify the focal character by name up front, even when we're meeting them for the first time. You might have to wait until someone talks to them on the next page. There's no intriguing reason to keep us guessing. Maybe Gibson was trying to evoke the sensation of being stoned, even in Kumiko's chapters, but it feels more like "Nyah nyah, I know something you don't know!"
And what I could follow wasn't much fun. Characters rarely enjoy themselves in the least, and the ending is once again creepy and morally bankrupt. Colin's not too bad as the A.I.s go, but I still find his abilities pretty hard to accept.
I expect never to pick up CZ. Probably nothing else from Gibson either. He's been one mostly bad trip after another for me.
In the interest of chasing a gritty adult book with something kid-friendly, I've started Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. How appropriate to begin and, I predict, end in September, which is the protagonist's name.