Mona Lisa Overdrive

The closing volume of the Sprawl trilogy, and the one that pays off both earlier books. Four viewpoints run in parallel — a yakuza daughter sent to London for safekeeping, a drug-wrecked drifter, a simstim megastar, and a squatter artist in a junkyard — and the plot turns on an attempt to fuse a human mind with the entities that now live in the matrix. Gibson lets the trilogy’s characters and loose ends surface here without explaining them, so it reads best after Neuromancer and Count Zero.

Context: Listed on an infrastructure team’s reading list because the Sprawl books are the origin document for how a generation of engineers pictures networks, interfaces and identity. This volume is the one most interested in what happens to a person who is stored rather than embodied — recorded personalities, constructs and copies as ordinary infrastructure.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — where this is listed, in the top tier.
• William Gibson — the author.
• Count Zero — the second volume, whose loa and characters return here.
• Artificial Intelligence — minds as something that can be run, copied and negotiated with.
• Ready Player One — a much later, much lighter treatment of the same lived-in-network premise.
• Science Fiction — the genre.