Count Zero

Why it’s on the list: The middle volume of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, after Neuromancer: three strands that converge at the end, in a cyberspace now inhabited by autonomous entities that present themselves as voodoo loa. It’s where Gibson’s world stops being one hacker’s story and starts being an economy.

Where I heard about it

• The a16z infrastructure team — on the a16z Infra Reading List, S tier under Sci-fi — Must reads, listed with the Sprawl trilogy. Their case for Gibson is vocabulary: they 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’).”

About this edition

The three strands: 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. The people who deal with the loa treat them as a working interface rather than a metaphor.

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.