The feeling of the book is bizarre. The characters themselves are mostly weird - indifferent parents hooked on TV soaps, crazed kids fighting street battles, dealers selling black market stuff, all portrayed as normal. The scenery corresponds to this as well - night clubs, half abandoned buildings, desert sites (of course, William Gibson said his vision of a future city is that of the Blade Runner movie, and it is exactly what you get).
Accepting the bizarreness, one thing still occurs to me as awkward - some characters look like archetypes taken straight out of a second rate movie. This is most apparent with Turner, the hired gun - naturally, he looks like a guy who is not to be messed with, listening to his special battle instinct, moral in his own way, with a soft spot hidden deep in his heart - sounds familiar perhaps ?
Some of the technological visions seem strange as well - not that they would be too sophisticated (one learns to accept far-fetched inventions in science fiction), but they are mildly inconsistent. As a result, hackers seem to be lagging behind the technological progress, still needing fingers and electrodes to navigate through cyberspace consisting of filled rectangles, while other people just need to touch a door knob to get into an almost-perfect virtual world.
Anyway, enough complaining. The book is a nice thriller, the psychological side perhaps spoiled a bit by a sweet happy end (the bad guys got nailed and the good guys all lived happily ever after), which sort of does not fit in with the otherwise bleak scenery. I would mark it as an average read.
Rated as average by Ceres on 1998-09-14
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