ps does Book Reviews - William Gibson "Mona Lisa Overdrive"

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[@grahmdionable]

it is too difficult learning about all the characters and technology in this book on the fly with no explanation. i dont like waiting till the end to learn about a piece of technology used in the beginning. i genuinely wish it had a glossary or something. it makes visualizing scenes of the book impossible and therefore lessens each scene's gravity. honestly, i love his stories and characters but piecing it all together is tiresome and discouraging. anybody know any scifi writers who do this better? these would make incredible graphic novels.

[@psenough]

sci fi in general has a lot of that, i guess only way to mitigate it is if you have certain visual references to similar things but ofcourse that never works fully. the alternative would be for the books to try to be more descriptive of every single new thing that shows up, which would destroy a lot of the narrative flow. nowdays with the internet it is possible to have an on demand glossary of what those terms mean exactly :D

[@godofchaoskhorne5043]

I think I liked Mona Lisa Overdrive the least out of the three books. It was also much messier than the others and had major plot holes. E.g Continuity is Angie's AI cousin because he's made out of biochips. But Continuity tries to poison her. The other AI voodoo gods warn her but don't tell her it's Continuity nor do they stop Continuity. 3jane does all this because she wants Angie? Because she's jealous of Angie? But .. so then construct 3Jane wins actually? When and how did Bobby steal the Aleph from 3Jane? Did he go to starlight? It's never ever clear why Bobby left Angie. Why the AI is setting this all up so Angie ends up dead and a construct of her on the Aleph. Why .. do the AI want her to marry Newport? Or maybe the AI gods from centaury? The whole centaury thing .. this was supposed to be some big reveal even though that was actually revealed before. And none of that makes sense. The AI found some alien signal which he figures is an alien AI god. In the end Bobby and Angie travel there. Maybe that's where Angie is supposed to marry? It's kinda played off as "they are going of to have cool adventures and lived happily and forever after) The Aleph wasn't connected to the matrix. And I figured it was disconnected when they removed it doen the factory. But somehow the finn can visit them and they can go to another star systems matrix ... Although the finn I guess might have moved into the aleph when it was connects with the Matrix since tick couldn't reach him Kumiko... Uhh yeah so what the fk was her point. I hated how at the end we got a ton of exposition. And Angie in her "dying and becoming a construct phase" was retelling eahc and every characters motivations and what it all meant etc. Idk loved returning to the world. Love Gibson's prose. But didn't jive with the story of this one. Count zero did the voodoo thing much better.while also having a far better story. Characters that came together better in the end and less plot holes.

[@depressedtv]

Mona is sixteen, and she had a hard upbringing, and then Eddy took advantage of her. I think her age and bad life attributed to her mindset and predicament.

[@psenough]

well she was clearly messed up, but it still felt like she should have known better at one point or another and done things differently (than just trying to run away while she was high that one time). maybe i'm just being picky. she was definitely a fun character to have though, brought a lot of entropy to the storyline :D

[@depressedtv]

I think the convoluted motivations of the A.I.s (3Jane, the loas, etc.) are part of the point of the books. We humans may not readily understand what their motivations are (gods work in mysterious ways)...... maybe? The evolution of the A.I.s is one of the more interesting things of the trilogy. And I really like the implications of Mona Lisa Overdrive's ending (in the final chapter Smooth Stone Beyond.)

[@psenough]

definitely!

[@trailblazingfive]

IMO Neuromancer was the best from the whole trilogy; as for the rise of power of corps and their intermingling with governments - since corps are for profit AKA want cash, and due to governmental monopoly on currency creation => the optimal strategy is to get cash from the source; in the grand scheme of things such tipping of the scale doesn't break the economical system since it's counterbalanced by millions of people working in each country; but the resulting concentration of power is deadly for the majority.