Count Zero

The middle volume of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, following Neuromancer and braiding three strands that only converge at the end: a freelance corporate extraction specialist reassembled from spare parts after a bombing, a teenage console cowboy who takes the handle Count Zero and nearly dies on his first real run, and a disgraced Paris art dealer hired by a dying billionaire to trace the maker of a box of assembled junk. Its lasting contribution is what has moved into cyberspace since the first book — the matrix is now inhabited by autonomous entities that present themselves as voodoo loa, and the people who deal with them treat that as a working interface rather than a metaphor.

Context: An infra team’s reason for reading Gibson is that he supplied the vocabulary the industry still uses. a16z credit him as “the main creator of cyberpunk,” whose books “created much of the aesthetic and vocabulary around the first internet wave (including VR, AI, and the word ‘cyberspace’).” Count Zero is where that world stops being one hacker’s story and starts being an economy.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — where this is listed, in the top tier.
• William Gibson — the author; his “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” line runs through Kyle’s notes.
• Mona Lisa Overdrive — the third and final Sprawl volume.
• Artificial Intelligence — the book’s loa are AI fragments with a religious user interface.
• Snow Crash — the cyberpunk successor Kyle has already read.
• Science Fiction — the genre.