Geekery of all stripes

Sprawl Trilogy

· David Bishop

Rating: 4 out of 5

It had been years since I read any of the books in the Sprawl Trilogy - Neuromancer, Count Zero Interrupt, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

I was wondering - and worried - that they wouldn’t hold up, given their outsized influence on me growing up. Hell, I still want an Ono Sendai 7 cyberdeck.

Having done a re-read, I can say that they mostly hold up. Neuromancer is the best, all of its achronisms (tapes, 8MB of hot RAM, pay phones) just serve to put me back in the 80’s, vs. throw me out of the story. The next two books aren’t quite as good - I think Gibson got to the end of the story, couldn’t figure out a better way to end it and just decided to throw “Aliens!” at the reader and run away. But the journey there was great. Well worth picking back up if you read it in your youth.