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[Tom Caswell <derpimpkar AT yahoo.com>]

I'm coming in late on this discussion but I love Gibson so I feel the need to comment.  Those three books are a great sci-fi trilogy.  My favorite thing about Gibson is the level of detail he gives to his work.  He talks as if he's lived there forever and doesn't try to explain the technology.  You better be smart enough to figure it out.

 

Bruce Sterling is another great author in the same vein.  HIs work tends to lean more towards the socio-political changes caused by technology.  Still excellent reads.  Schismatrix is a classic.

 

Wasn't the construct where Count Zero was living in Mona Lisa Overdrive a "rough approximation of everything"?  Cool iea.  I also liked the whole voodoo theme and where it led.  I'll leave that answer for readers to find.  It's worth it.

 

Tom

Sil Greene <Sil_greene AT unc.edu> wrote:

> .:> I can't remember if it was "Neuromancer" or "Mona Lisa Overdrive" but one 
> .:> of William Gibson's stories has a character, ...I have this image of a dude 
> .:> being carried around on a stretcher with a car battery powering a computer 
> .:> he's connected to that's online, "jacked in to cyberspace."
> .:> I think he was still alive. That character was, but there was another 
> .:> character that had died, but was still online.
> .:
> .:It was Neuromancer. The character was Dixie Flatline, who got his name
> .:from being fried by anti-intrusion software while jacked in and cracking
> .:into someplace he wasn't wanted. I have longed for such software myself
> .:ever since I started getting spam, back in 1995.
>
> Dixie was the another-character-that-died-but-was-still-online. His mind 
> was recorded before his death, and the resulting
>  recording ("construct" 
> was the term Gibson used) could be accessed for advice, or to do tasks in 
> cyberspace, or whatever. An expert system built on the memories of the 
> expert. (And this was in Neuromancer -- tho another Neuromancer 
> character, the Finn, appeared as a construct in Mona Lisa Overdrive.)
>
> The dude on the stretcher appeared in Mona Lisa Overdrive, and was indeed 
> alive. He was Count Zero, title character of the second book. He wasn't 
> jacked into _the_ cyberspace, but something more like his own private 
> cyberspace, in a device called an 'aleph' that was mounted on the 
> stretcher.
>
> --sil
>
> -- 
> "If you put your supper dish to your ears you can hear the sounds
> of a restaurant." --Snoopy (Charles Schultz 02-12-2000 RIP)
> Sil_Greene AT unc.edu 
>
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