Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”

History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. “This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. “The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.” In this novel we see a return of Molly Millions (though she is semi-retired and operating under a different alias) and a seamy tangle of interests involving organized crime, near future state of the market tech, drugs and biotech, corporate espionage, capitalistic anarchy and all rolled up in the neo-noir setting that has become Gibson’s trademark. What began in the epochal Neuromancer, the Sprawl – that confluence of all the major urban centers on the United States east coast, from Boston to Atlanta – is a setting that provides Gibson’s able mind and extraordinary talent to describe for us a dystopian cyberpunk landscape that has influenced SF writing ever since. Gibson’s 1988 conclusion to his groundbreaking Sprawl trilogy was a demonstration of some of his best writing.

Dick’s homey futurism – his is the messenger, the rent-a-cop, the retail appliance repairman in the grimy but tech advanced future – our blue collar, street wise guide to the mesmerizing world building. If I could imagine and set down the kind of books I want to read, his would be as near to the mark as possible. or even known. And behind the intrigue lurks the shadowy Yakuza, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes. The Mona Lisa Overdrive. Enter Gibson's unique world - lyric and mechanical, erotic and violent, sobering and exciting - where multinational corporations and high tech outlaws vie for power, traveling into the computer-generated universe known as cyberspace. Into this world comes Mona, a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is on a collision course with internationally famous Sense/Net star Angie Mitchell. Since childhood, Angie has been able to tap into cyberspace without a computer. Now, from inside cyberspace, a kidnapping plot is masterminded by a phantom entity who has plans for Mona, Angie, and all humanity, plans that cannot be controlled. William Gibson, author of the extraordinary multiaward-winning novel Neuromancer, has written his most brilliant and thrilling work to date.

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson