Books › Count Zero
Count Zero
First published 1986 · 360 pages
A neon-drenched, adrenaline-fueled plunge into a hyper-capitalist future where street hackers and mercenaries collide with digital gods.
What it feels like
Reading this feels like jacking directly into a neon-lit, rain-slicked fever dream. The narrative moves with a propulsive, fragmented energy, bouncing between a hardened corporate mercenary, a disgraced art dealer, and a desperate street hacker before pulling their threads into a tight, explosive knot. The prose is dense and hyper-stylized, demanding you keep up as it throws you into a world of casual body modification, ruthless hyper-capitalism, and digital voodoo. It is a deeply paranoid, atmospheric experience that wraps you in a gritty, sensory-rich haze of chrome and blood. Perfect for readers who crave hardboiled noir aesthetics mixed with visionary, techno-poetic worldbuilding, this is a story that hums with the electric dread of a future that feels frighteningly close.
- Mood
- neon-lit
- paranoid
- hallucinatory
- gritty
- Tone
- cynical
- street-smart
- detached
- stylish
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- corporate exploitation · technological transcendence · human obsolescence · digital spirituality · survival
- The writing
- Dense, hyper-stylized, and sensory-rich, the writing blends hardboiled noir rhythms with a dizzying array of techno-poetic jargon.
- The arc
- The journey begins in fragmented disorientation and accelerates into a frantic, converging climax of revelation and desperate survival.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave gritty, atmospheric cyberpunk and love piecing together complex, multi-POV narratives dripping with neon aesthetics.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- body horror
- drug use
- gore
About the book
Turner, corporate mercenary, wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then Hosaka Corporation reactivates him for a mission more dangerous than the one he's recovering from: Maas-Neotek's chief of R&D is defecting. Turner is the one assigned to get him out intact, along with the biochip he's perfected. But this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties--some of whom aren't remotely human.
Bobby Newmark is entirely human: a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo on the Net and a price on his head, Newmark thinks he's only trying to get out alive.
The second novel of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero is a stylish, streetsmart, frighteningly probable parable of the future and sequel to Neuromancer.
Description from Open Library.
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