Mona Lisa Overdrive

Author

William Gibson, born 1948, American-Canadian writer resident in Vancouver. Published in 1988 by Bantam Spectra in the United States and Victor Gollancz in the United Kingdom.

The third and final volume of the Sprawl trilogy, following Neuromancer (1984) and Count Zero (1986). It is set roughly eight years after Count Zero and fifteen after Neuromancer, and resolves plot threads left open by both.

Description

The novel runs four separate narratives that converge late.

Kumiko is the daughter of a Yakuza boss, sent to London for safety during a gang conflict, accompanied by an AI tutor she carries as a small object and knows as Colin. Mona is a teenage prostitute in Florida whose resemblance to the simstim star Angela Mitchell makes her useful to people planning a substitution. Angela Mitchell, carried over from Count Zero, is the celebrity in question, able to access cyberspace without a deck because of implants her father installed in her brain. Slick Henry is a sculptor in a New Jersey wasteland called Dog Solitude who builds large robots from salvage and has memory damage from a corrective sentence. Someone delivers a comatose man on a stretcher into his care, wired to a device called the Aleph.

The Aleph is an approximation of the entire matrix held in a portable unit, containing constructs of the dead and of people still alive. Much of the book's weight sits on what continued existence inside it amounts to, and whether a construct is a person or a recording that behaves like one.

Molly Millions returns under the name Sally Shears, older, still working, and operating with a set of obligations from the earlier books that she has never discharged. Her scenes with Kumiko provide the novel's most direct account of what a career like hers costs over time.

The trilogy's frame closes here. The AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer merged at the end of the first novel and the matrix became self-aware. In Mona Lisa Overdrive that unified entity has since fragmented into the loa, the voodoo-derived personalities introduced in Count Zero, and the novel explains what caused the fragmentation and what the matrix has since made contact with.

Relevance

Where Neuromancer introduced cyberspace as an environment, this book is concerned with what persists inside it. Personality constructs, the Aleph, and the loa are all attempts at the same question: whether a pattern that behaves like a person and remembers being one has the standing of a person.

The novel also gives more attention to bodies than the first two. Mona's face is surgically altered to match another woman's, Angela's access to the matrix is a consequence of neurosurgery performed on her as a child without consent, and Slick Henry's memory loss was inflicted as punishment. In each case the modification was done to the character rather than chosen by them, which is a different arrangement from the voluntary augmentation the trilogy is usually remembered for.

Kumiko's tutor Colin is worth noting on its own. It is a portable AI that projects a companion, gives advice, and is not always candid about whose interests it serves. Gibson wrote it in 1988.

Criticism

Readers coming to it after Neuromancer often find it slower, since the novel assumes the world rather than introducing it and spends its attention on consequences instead. Gibson himself has described the Sprawl books as work he moved past, and the trilogy's close marks his turn toward the nearer-present settings of the Bridge and Blue Ant sequences.

Related Reading

• Neuromancer
• Pattern Recognition
• Snow Crash
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Diamond Age (Book)
• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World
• Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators
• Bots: The Origin of a New Species
• Android Epistemology
• Consciousness Slum
• The Cybercultures Reader
• Anthropology Through Science Fiction