Mona Lisa Overdrive

Cyberpunk as a genre has always been about the blurred line between simulation, simulacra, and the bloody real. Mona Lisa Overdrive is four novellas masquerading as a novel, with interesting bits scattered through an undifferentiated mass.

Decades after Count Zero, various people are trying to make sense of When It Changed, when Neuromancer took place and cyberspace gained sentience. Our focal characters (none of them rise to the stakes of protagonist) are Angie Mitchell, Sense/Net star, sacred to the cyber-loa, and kicking a drug habit. Kumiko is daughter of a Yakuza boss sent to London to protect her from corporate war. Slick Henry lives in a toxic wasteland in New Jersey and builds immense Survival Research Labs style robots to deal with the consequences of a jail sentence that removed his short-term memory. And Mona Lisa herself is a teenage prostitute who looks just like Angie, and could be used to replace her.

There’s some kind of scheme involving Molly and 3Jane, plots and scores in the Yakuza and Sense/Net and inhuman goals of the AI, and yet none of it really matters at all. The invocation of brands and artifacts comes off as rote Gibsonian pastiche, rather than a view into an alternate consumer culture where the street finds its own use for technology. Gibson is bored with the Sprawl, and it shows.