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Author | William Gibson |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Discipline | Science fiction (cyberpunk) |
Published | 1984, 1986, 1988 |
Media type | Print, digital |
No. of books | 3 |
The Sprawl trilogy (also known as the Neuromancer trilogy) is William Gibson's first set of novels, and is composed of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). [1]
The novels are all set in the same fictional future. The Sprawl trilogy shares this setting with Gibson's short stories "Johnny Mnemonic" (1981), "Burning Chrome" (1982), and "New Rose Hotel" (1984). [1]
The novels are set in a near-future world dominated by corporations and ubiquitous computing. The events of the novels are spaced over 16 years, and although there are familiar characters that appear, each novel tells a self-contained story. Gibson focuses on the effects of technology: the unintended consequences as it filters out of research labs and onto the street where it finds new purposes. He explores a world of direct mind-machine links ("jacking in"), emerging machine intelligence, and a global information space, which he calls "cyberspace". Some of the novels' action takes place in The Sprawl, officially the "Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis" - an urban environment extending along most of the East Coast of the United States (as a fictional extrapolation of the real-life Northeast megalopolis).
The story arc which frames the trilogy follows a wide cast of characters in a persistent, ongoing narrative - the major commonality between the three being The Sprawl itself. It focuses on the self-contained stories of each character, and highlights their narrative links through suggestion, references, and imagery.
Neuromancer tells the story of Case, a cyberspace "cowboy" (hacker) that gets picked up for a job with an unknown benefactor. The book is the only one in the trilogy that follows a single cohesive plot, with the sequels both featuring multi-strand narrative structures that culminate in the end.
Count Zero consists of three major protagonists, and chapters alternate from one character's story to the next. The first of these is Turner. Turner is an ex-military mercenary. After becoming the victim of a bombing attack, Turner is hired by an old colleague to assist the dangerous extraction of a tech developer. The second is of Bobby Newmark, a teenager living in the slums with his mother. After an attempt at an illegal cyberspace run, Bobby is forced into hiding when it becomes apparent his experiment has put a target on his back. The third is of Marly Krushkova, a disgraced art museum curator who, after being caught in a major fraud scam, is hired by the immensely wealthy Josef Virek to find the artist behind a series of enigmatic artworks.
Finally, Mona Lisa Overdrive follows four narrative plot threads in a pattern similar to that of Count Zero. The first is of Kumiko, teenage daughter to a Yakuza boss, whose father sends her to London to keep her safe during an anticipated gang war. The second is of artist Slick Henry, who spends his time making robots from scrap metal. Slick is suddenly thrust into the intrigue of the novel when someone calls in a debt by asking him to watch over a cyberspace cowboy locked in a run. The third thread follows prostitute Mona and her relationship with her abusive boyfriend/pimp. The final plot thread follows Angie Mitchell, a "simstim" (virtual sensory movies) actress in rehabilitation who can access cyberspace mentally.
The trilogy was commercially and critically successful. Steven Poole, writing in The Guardian , described "Neuromancer and the two novels which followed, Count Zero (1986) and the gorgeously titled Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)" as making up "a fertile holy trinity, a sort of Chrome Koran (the name of one of Gibson's future rock bands) of ideas inviting endless reworkings". [2]
All three books were nominated for major science fiction awards, including:
Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.
Vernor Steffen Vinge was an American science fiction author and professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He was the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2004).
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the Information Age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
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Count Zero is a science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson, originally published in 1986. It presents a near future whose technologies include a network of supercomputers that created a "matrix" in "cyberspace", an accessible, virtual, three-dimensionally active "inner space", which, for Gibson—writing these decades earlier—was seen as being dominated by violent competition between small numbers of very rich individuals and multinational corporations. The novel is composed of a trio of plot lines that ultimately converge.
Mona Lisa Overdrive is a science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson, published in 1988. It is the final novel of the cyberpunk Sprawl trilogy, following Neuromancer and Count Zero, taking place eight years after the events of the latter. The novel was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1989.
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Bobby Newmark is one of the main characters in the William Gibson novel Count Zero. His handle in the Matrix is "Count Zero", from which the novel derives its name. Newmark is one of several Gibson characters who live through information.
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The Bridge trilogy is a series of novels by William Gibson, his second after the successful Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy comprises the novels Virtual Light (1993), Idoru, (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999). A short story, "Skinner's Room", was originally composed for Visionary San Francisco, a 1990 museum exhibition exploring the future of San Francisco.
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The works of William Gibson encompass literature, journalism, acting, recitation, and performance art. Primarily renowned as a novelist and short fiction writer in the cyberpunk milieu, Gibson invented the metaphor of cyberspace in "Burning Chrome" (1982) and emerged from obscurity in 1984 with the publication of his debut novel Neuromancer. Gibson's early short fiction is recognized as cyberpunk's finest work, effectively renovating the science fiction genre which had been hitherto considered widely insignificant.
"Burning Chrome" is a science fiction short story by Canadian-American writer William Gibson, first published in Omni in July 1982. Gibson first read the story at a science fiction convention in Denver, Colorado in the autumn of 1981, to an audience of four people, among them Bruce Sterling. It was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1983 and collected with the rest of Gibson's early short fiction in a 1986 volume of the same name.
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