Signed
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Signed first American edition, 1988
Mona Lisa Overdrive is the concluding novel in William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, following Neuromancer and Count Zero. Set in the corporatized sprawl of the near future, the novel unfolds through a series of intersecting narratives that trace the lingering effects of earlier conflicts. Among its central figures are Kumiko Yanaka, the daughter of a Yakuza boss sent abroad for protection, and Molly Millions, whose past actions continue to shape events in unexpected ways. This first American edition was preceded by the British Gollancz edition.
Signed copy. Signed by Gibson on the title page.
Hardcover. First American Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. Nebula Award nominee (1989). British Science Fiction Award nominee (1989). Hugo Award nominee (1989). Locus Award nominee (1989). ISBN: 0553052500. #10734.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Signed copy. Signed by Gibson on the title page.
Hardcover. First American Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. Nebula Award nominee (1989). British Science Fiction Award nominee (1989). Hugo Award nominee (1989). Locus Award nominee (1989). ISBN: 0553052500. #10734.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) concludes the Sprawl Trilogy by widening its frame rather than narrowing it. Where Neuromancer drove toward a single convergent event and Count Zero wove three separate threads into a loose resolution, the final volume runs four storylines simultaneously, each set in a different part of the world and operating at a different social level, and allows them to intersect with less insistence on explaining why.
Kumiko Yanaka arrives in London from Tokyo, sent by her Yakuza father to stay with a business associate while unspecified difficulties resolve themselves at home. She is thirteen, recently bereaved, and accompanied by a ghost, a Colin, a chip-based AI companion given to her by her father, whose dry commentary provides much of the novel's dark humor. Her sections take place in Notting Hill and feel more subdued compared with the novel's more kinetic parts. Mona is a teenage girl from the streets of the American South, poor and easily manipulated. She is drawn into a scheme involving a surgical double for Angie Mitchell, the simstim star from Count Zero whose neural implants give her unmediated access to cyberspace. Slick Henry lives in a junkyard in New Jersey called Dog Solitude with an artist named Gentry, who is obsessed with the shape of cyberspace itself, and who has a comatose man on a life-support stretcher in the back room connected to the matrix in ways nobody fully understands. Molly Millions also returns, older, more tired, and operating under a different name.
What ties these threads together is the continued presence of the intelligences that emerged from the events of Neuromancer, now dispersed through the matrix and taking forms that reflect various cultures they have encountered. The Voodoo loa that appeared in Count Zero return here, and Gibson is more explicit about what they are and where they came from. The ending moves into territory that is more genuinely strange than anything in the earlier novels.
Mona Lisa Overdrive is the least plot-driven of the trilogy but arguably the most atmospheric. Readers who want the forward momentum of Neuromancer are apt to find it slower. What it offers instead is a sense of a world that has been thoroughly inhabited, where the consequences of earlier events have distributed themselves across many lives, and where the system Gibson built across three novels is allowed, finally, to simply exist.
Kumiko Yanaka arrives in London from Tokyo, sent by her Yakuza father to stay with a business associate while unspecified difficulties resolve themselves at home. She is thirteen, recently bereaved, and accompanied by a ghost, a Colin, a chip-based AI companion given to her by her father, whose dry commentary provides much of the novel's dark humor. Her sections take place in Notting Hill and feel more subdued compared with the novel's more kinetic parts. Mona is a teenage girl from the streets of the American South, poor and easily manipulated. She is drawn into a scheme involving a surgical double for Angie Mitchell, the simstim star from Count Zero whose neural implants give her unmediated access to cyberspace. Slick Henry lives in a junkyard in New Jersey called Dog Solitude with an artist named Gentry, who is obsessed with the shape of cyberspace itself, and who has a comatose man on a life-support stretcher in the back room connected to the matrix in ways nobody fully understands. Molly Millions also returns, older, more tired, and operating under a different name.
What ties these threads together is the continued presence of the intelligences that emerged from the events of Neuromancer, now dispersed through the matrix and taking forms that reflect various cultures they have encountered. The Voodoo loa that appeared in Count Zero return here, and Gibson is more explicit about what they are and where they came from. The ending moves into territory that is more genuinely strange than anything in the earlier novels.
Mona Lisa Overdrive is the least plot-driven of the trilogy but arguably the most atmospheric. Readers who want the forward momentum of Neuromancer are apt to find it slower. What it offers instead is a sense of a world that has been thoroughly inhabited, where the consequences of earlier events have distributed themselves across many lives, and where the system Gibson built across three novels is allowed, finally, to simply exist.
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