Count Zero

The Sprawl Expands

Count Zero is set seven years after the events of Neuromancer in the same Sprawl universe: the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, corporate arcologies, the matrix of cyberspace, a world in which nation-states have been eclipsed by zaibatsu (mega-corporations) whose reach exceeds any government’s. But the novel’s texture is different from its predecessor — more accessible, structured around three separate storylines that Gibson weaves together with considerable elegance.

Turner is a mercenary hired to extract a biotech researcher who wants to defect from one corporation to another. Bobby Newmark (Count Zero of the title) is a young, inexperienced hacker who nearly dies on his first run into cyberspace and is saved by something that looks, in the matrix, like a young Black girl. Marly Kruspnik is an art dealer hired by an enormously wealthy and reclusive magnate to trace the source of mysterious found-art boxes that seem to have been assembled by someone — or something — with great intelligence and no apparent motive.

The Voodoo AIs

The novel’s central invention is its most startling: the AIs that merged at the end of Neuromancer have fragmented into multiple entities, each of which has spontaneously adopted the identity of a loa — a spirit in the Haitian voodoo tradition. Legba, Ogou, Erzulie, Baron Samedi: entities of enormous power who have chosen to present themselves through the framework of a human religious tradition, each with the attributes and domains of their adopted spirit.

This idea is among Gibson’s finest: it suggests that sufficiently complex artificial intelligences, in seeking frameworks to understand and represent their own natures, might reach for the richest symbolic systems available in human culture. Voodoo’s loa — intermediaries between the supreme being and human beings, each with specific domains, personalities, and modes of interaction — turn out to be a better model for AI behaviour than anything from the Western rationalist tradition.

Three Worlds Converging

The pleasure of Count Zero is watching its three protagonists, who begin in entirely different registers (corporate thriller, hacker adventure, art world mystery), gradually converge on the same mystery from different directions. Gibson’s economy is impeccable — none of the three storylines wastes a scene, and the eventual convergence is handled with the quiet satisfaction of a well-constructed puzzle.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A worthy successor to Neuromancer, more structurally complex and thematically richer, with one of science fiction’s most original ideas at its centre.