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Count Zero | 
 enlarge | Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Ace Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $7.29
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Rating:  64 reviews
Sales Rank: 130705
Media: Paperback
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.7
ISBN: 0441013678
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780441013678
ASIN: 0441013678
Publication Date: March 7, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Earlier printing. Smooth spine, clean text, good cover. Prompt 1st class shipping. Thanks!
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Amazon.com Review
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. A stylish, streetsmart, frighteningly probable parable of the future and sequel to Neuromancer
Product Description
A 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: to get a defecting chief of R&D-and the biochip he's perfected-out intact. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties-some of whom aren't remotely human.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 59 more reviews...
More action September 1, 2008
C. Pitman
Gibson ramps up the action in the second of the Sprawl Trilogy books. Case and Molly are nowhere to be seen, but that's okay.
 Cyberpunk sweetness June 10, 2008
Mike Dalke (Ban Chang, Rayong, Thailand)
First 25%, get your bearings on the story threads. A lot going on here- people, places, virtual reality, reality, etc. Had to be patient to put the new information into my folder called, "Sweet."
Middle 50%, feel out the people, plot and possibilities. Stacks of circumstances pile up. I ask myself if and when it will topple. Stacks weave, twist and waver until they form a wonderful skyscraper.
And the last 75% watch your expectations unravel into a tapestry of switchbacks and surprises. My expectations were set atop of that circumstantial skyscraper and taking the rapid elevator back down to the end of the book was a wicked read.
 Why do I keep doing this to myself??? February 29, 2008
Thomas Duff (Portland, OR United States)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I don't know why I keep doing this to myself. I run across a William Gibson novel, this time Count Zero. It's cyberpunk, so I know I like the genre. I remembered long ago liking Neuromancer. But then I check back on my last ten years of reading logs and find that I've consistently given Gibson 2's and 3's on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). But I'm sure it'll be different this time... And once again, the answer is no. Love the writing, love the images, and am absolutely and totally lost when it comes to the plot (or what passes for one). I guess I'm just not sophisticated enough to "get it".
This mercenary is brought back into play by an agent to recover a coveted scientist from a rival company. The mercenary is actually "regrown" as he was blown to bits in a prior mission. But now he's back and pretty much a new person. But at the time the scientist is supposed to rendezvous with the extraction team, things go to pieces. And instead of the scientist, he actually sent out his daughter. Meanwhile in plotline #2, a woman is hired by an extremely rich individual to trace down the maker of a certain art item... a box of seemingly random items. But the rich guy is actually kept alive in an ever-expanding vat of chemicals while he apparently tries to figure out a way to inhabit a healthy body. And plotline #3 involves some guy who is a cowboy hacker and nearly gets killed running an online incursion using some unfamiliar security software that a friend asked him to try out. During his escape, he lost the software in his software deck when he was mugged. And now a number of murky characters really need to get that software back before bad things happen. And somehow, all three of these plotlines come together at the end. Just don't ask me to explain it, as it was beyond me...
Gibson can paint a cyperpunk scene better than nearly anyone. His contraptions and constructs aren't always explained, so you often have to keep reading, assuming that you'll piece it together later. Where I consistently come up short with his writing is with the story-line. As in, I don't get them, they're extremely obtuse, and you have to be either way smarter than I am or a complete sci-fi geek to understand. I'll admit to not doing "subtle" well, but "subtle" would be a step up in clarity for this book. I kept reading as I loved the imagery, but I knew about halfway through that I wasn't going to understand one of the plots at all, nor was I likely to get the ending, whatever it may turn out to be. I was right...
I won't argue with the conventional wisdom that Gibson is a master of the cyberpunk genre. I'm just sorry that, at least for me, the story-lines don't match up with the quality of the imagery.
My favorite cyberpunk novel October 27, 2007
David Perry (the road to the next big thing)
I am an expert in computer malware and computer security. That's what I do for a living, is to be a pundit on these topics. The road that put me to this is a story unto itself, but let's just say the last twenty some years of my life are all about hackers, cybercrime, and malicious computer code. (bear with me here--there's a point to be made)
In 1986 I was working at Eagle Computer with my high school buddy, Keith. (Keith was one of those ultra competent people who could do whatever he set his mind to, and usually do it pretty dang well) Keith had gotten me into the computer industry for the second time, and we both read the works of William Gibson and smiled the secret smile of the insider.
You see, we knew hackers. Famous (infamous is probably closer to the fact) hackers of the 1980's, we had 'handles' on 'elite' BBS systems, we had copies of the Technical Reference Manual, the Pink Shirt book, and many other arcane reference.
And we read Gibson.
Count Zero describes a world so fully lit that it has nearly come to pass in reality. From the mincome arcologies of the sprawl, to the drug dealer transformed into an underground icon of the Finn. (Mister Gibson, we love the Finn!) to Bobby Newmark, whose own abilities are not as important as the protective guidance of eldritch computer gods and dumb luck. (this part of Count Zero is stark realism, we are all dependent on dumb luck or providence in most ways.)
The point of telling you who I am is this. I meet these characters wherever I go. The Bobbies...the Jaylenes, the Turners--THESE PEOPLE EXIST! In Moscow and Dubai and New York and San Francisco and Sydney and Kota Kinabalu, Sabah---the modern world is populated with the characters from Count Zero. Every Hat (white black gray or blue) I have met is one of these people. And it goes without saying that everyone in the world of computer security has read this book.
Monday I taught a class in malware taxonomy and basic principles in England (to new sales and marketing types in our UK office) and I gave away a copy of this book as one of a clutch of prizes.
Mister Gibson, if you read this review, can you give us an origin story on the Finn? Your other work is just as brilliant, each in it's own way, but this is the prime cut.
The best Science Fiction not only predicts the future, it invents it. The next time you encounter a botnet or identity thieving keylogger, think of this novel.
persevere,
Not Free SF Reader October 23, 2007
Blue Tyson
Retrieval, via mercenary and loser.
Another good cyberpunk novel by Gibson, throwing another whole pile of stuff at you that you see other authors echo later, like Walter Jon Williams, or Richard Morgan, for the voodoo elements in virtuality.
The corporations here are nasty, and if they decide to deal with you, they hire guys like one of the protagonist warriors in this book, preferably without them knowing what is going on given they have woken up in a new body.
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