Name: Count Zero
ISBN: 9780877957690

Count Zero

Turner, corporate mercenary, wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him for a mission more dangerous than the one he's recovering from: Maas-Neotek's chief of R&D is defecting. Turner is the one assigned to get him out intact, along with the biochip he's perfected. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties--some of whom aren't remotely human. Bobby Newmark is entirely human: a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo on the Net and a price on his head, Newmark thinks he's only trying to get out alive. The second novel of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero is a stylish, streetsmart, frighteningly probable parable of the future and sequel to Neuromancer.

What Hacker News says

keiferskiSep 2026

William Gibson is one of my favorite writers, and it's funny because I think he has the exact opposite problem. Most of his novels open on the action, in some interesting location. But gradually they get weaker, with a few (Mona Lisa Overdrive, in my case) becoming a real slog to finish. I've probably read the first 50 pages of Neuromancer 20 times, but only the entire novel 3-4 times in 20+ years.

There's the famous opening line to Neuromancer, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." But I actually like the openings of Count Zero and Virtual Light more:

CZ: They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming.

The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel. Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

VL: The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

IMO some writers are just better as short story writers, not novelists, but are forced into writing longer works by the publishing system.

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atombenderSep 2026

Gibson is one of those writers who are much better prose stylists than plotters.

I enjoy reading his prose immensely, but he's been stamping out books with the same template for ever: an expert is hired to do something. Turns out there's a man with unlimited cash flow funding everything, but was hiding his true intentions (usually in order to lay a trap), which are revealed, and then some McGuffin is saved or eliminated or whatever; meanwhile, the main character mostly didn't do anything, just a passive spectator to some plot unfolding around them. The one I will forgive most easily here is Count Zero, which I think is much better than its reputation (except for the Haitian voodoo deity stuff, which didn't land for me); while the template is the same, the ruse connects well with Neuromancer, and it's just a fun, action-filled book that is definitely not boring. (The ruse in The Peripheral, by comparison, was deeply unsatisfying. Agency was junk, most of the book describing preparations for a military attack while the main character sleeps. Even the prose was much worse and much sloppier than usual.)

What's interesting is that his early short stories are much more original, I think. Burning Chrome, New Rose Hotel, and Johnny Mnemonic, for example, show flashes of originality that maybe Gibson wasn't able to keep up when plotting out whole novels.

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keiferskiJul 2026

My favorite part of Gibson’s Count Zero was always the hydroponic gardens covering an entire floor of a New Jersey housing complex. Probably not as realistic as the setup in the link, but both are still very cool ideas.

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phrotomaJan 2026

Just taking this opportunity to point out (in case you haven't read it) that your project is very reminiscent of a fantastic scene from the classic cyberpunk novel Count Zero, in which the main charater Bobby catches a lift from Lucas, some kind of cybervoodoo shaman, in an autonomous limo named "Ahmed" equipped with advanced electronic countersurveilance.

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"Lucas," Bobby said, his mouth half full of cold fried chicken, "how come it's taking us an hour and a half to get to New York? We aren't exactly crawling.

"Because," Lucas said, pausing for another sip of cold white wine, "that's how long it's taking us. Ahmed has all the factory options, including a first-rate countersurveillance system. On the road, rolling, Ahmed provides a remarkable degree of privacy, more than I'm ordinarily willing to pay for in New York. Ahmed, you get the feeling anybody's trying to get to us, listen in or anything?"

"No, sir," the voice said. "Eight minutes ago our identification panel was infra-scanned by a Tactical helicopter. The helicopter's number was MH-dash-3-dash-848, piloted by Corporal Roberto

"Okay, okay," Lucas said. "Fine. Never mind You see? Ahmed got more on those Tacs than they got on us."

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colechristensenDec 2025

Things I really liked:

- The Murderbot Diaries (all of them)

- Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy) – perfection

- Discworld series (almost all of them)

- Bobiverse serise (all of them)

- Old Man's War series

- Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir – Werner Herzog's autobiography

- The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin

- Kissinger: A Biography (approval of Kissinger not required)