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Book News, Guests | December 14, 2009

Amy Gray: IMG How to Be a Vampire

4 comments By Amy Gray

Oh, hi. I'm Amy Gray. I like smoking, carbs, and words. I live in the (currently) sleek humidity of Melbourne, Australia. When not lying... Continue »
  1. $10.49 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

    How to Be a Vampire: A Fangs-On Guide for the Newly Undead

    Amy Gray

Mona Lisa Overdrive (Bantam Spectra Book)

by William Gibson

Mona Lisa Overdrive (Bantam Spectra Book) Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

William Gibson, author of the extraordinary multiaward-winning novel Neuromancer, has written his most brilliant and thrilling work to date...

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...or even known. And behind the intrigue lurks the shadowy Yazuka, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes...or so they think.

Review:

"Told in a gorgeous, highly compressed almost poetic style that requires the reader's attention and intelligence." Publishers Weekly
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
Katherine Stuart, November 29, 2008 (view all comments by Katherine Stuart)
The Count returns! It’s a fantastic ending to the trilogy. Angie – the girl with the ability to mentally connect to the internet – is back. As is Sally or Molly as she’s known in Neuromancer. New characters come in – Kukimo – a young, Japanese girl; and Mona – a young American junkie. There’s the damaged Slick Henry who builds fabulous, huge automatons to exorcise his demons. The plot is fun – 3Jane is jealous of Angie – now an international simstim star – and plans to kill her and replace her with Mona who naturally looks very similar and with some plastic surgery is close enough for the masses so that few will know.

It’s wonderful, beautiful. Bobby and Angie are still deeply in love though through most of the book they are inexplicably separated and Bobby is deep in a personally constructed cyberspace.

The story mainly centers on Angie and Mona – Angie is all grown-up fighting an addiction to a designer drug, missing Bobby, and generally having entered a state of ennui regarding stardom. Mona has been dragged into some kind of scheme by her loser boyfriend who swears this – finally – is their (his) way up. He ends up dead.

Kukimo seems to be mainly an fanciful device to create new technologies and a nod to the increasing importance of Japan in technological advancement. An important detail in 1988.

As usual Gibson’s prose is pristine and superbly paced. I’m still really invested Bobby’s fate, and as much as the story revolves around the women I’m most drawn to Slick Henry. Gibson doesn’t perfectly handle all the themes. The transition from biological to technological beings that both Bobby and Angie undergo is not handled with as much deftness as I would have expected. He does a much better job of this transition in All Tomorrow’s Parties. But he does make it sweet and romantic. I would say overall the book has a very sweet, romantic vibe that is touching.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780553281743
Author:
Gibson, William
Publisher:
Spectra Books
Location:
New York :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Science Fiction - General
Subject:
Computers
Subject:
Surgery, Plastic
Subject:
Twenty-first century
Subject:
Internet
Subject:
Internet (Computer network) -- Fiction.
Copyright:
1988
Edition Description:
Bantam paperback ed.
Series:
Bantam Spectra Book
Series Volume:
125.
Publication Date:
February 1997
Binding:
Mass Market Paperbound
Language:
English
Pages:
308
Dimensions:
6.90x4.30x.87 in. .34 lbs.
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