The last of the Sprawl trilogy: the AIs of Neuromancer have suffered a traumatized, cataclysmic coming to self-awareness and now haunt cyberspace as voodoo powers.
Mona's pimp sells her to a plastic surgeon in New York and she's turned overnight into someone else. The pimp winds up dead. Mona weeps for him. She's a sweet, dumb girl... so far.
Angie the famous Hollywood stim star has started remembering things. Despite the efforts of studio bosses to keep her in ignorance, Angie will discover who she really is... and why she doesn't need to jack into the Matrix in order to enter cyberspace.
In the depths of the rustbelt, the ring of steel garbage and toxic waste surrounding the Sprawl, Gentry obsessively seeks the darkest secrets of the Matrix. Seeking rapture.
When an impossibly tall and powerful skyscraper of data appears suddenly in the landscape of the Matrix, Gentry is ready for it, Angie is part of it, and Mona is set for overdrive. Rapture is on the agenda for all three, but others greedy for money and power will fight them to the death.
Industry Reviews
Another brilliant, gritty, densely textured novel from the author of Neuromancer (paperback, 1984; Hugo, Nebula, P.K. Dick awards) and Count Zero (1986). From elements of the previous novels, Gibson spins three story lines, knitting them together about 15 years after the close of Count Zero. Angle Mitchell, whose scientist father customized her brain to link directly (if unwillingly) to the consensual hallucination of cyberspace, is now the Sense/Net star. Her lover, Bobby Newmark, Count Zero, has recently disappeared. Jacked into a massive biochip, his unconscious, dying body is brought to the Factory, an abandoned industrial site located on toxic landfill in New Jersey. There, Gentry, a seeker obsessed with the shape of cyberspace (which parallels Bobby's search for the truth of When It Changed - the moment when cyberspace became aware of itself, generating independent Als within the matrix), recognizes the biochip as a key to his quest. Molly, the augmented mercenary of Neuromancer, involved in a plot to kidnap Angle, brings her together with Mona, a young junkie and Angle look-alike, and then to the Factory - where. in an uncharacteristically fantastic sequence, Angle joins Bobby in the synthetic reality of cyberspace (and we receive hints of a truly innovative First Contact). As usual with Gibson, the point here is not so much the plot as the future in which it unfolds - and the remarkably accomplished prose with which he reveals it. This one probably won't win over any new fans, but the many extant will be delighted. (Kirkus Reviews)
