Sprawl trilogy
#586 of 2,654 all-time
Sprawl trilogy
William Gibson
11 people recommended it in 8 threads, 2011–2024.
What people on Hacker News said
The Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) by William Gibson - 9/10 - I had read Neuromancer 3 times but never the next two. I was pleasantly surprised to find the second and third novel easier to read* but just as enjoyable as Neuromancer.
Going back to Sprawl after reading Blue Ant, new layers of detail became apparent to me. There is a lot more than just an AI-driven singularity story going on. If anything, the [Spoiler!] Neuromancer-Wintermute union is a McGuffin made too explicit, distracting many readers from the rest of the interesting content. Like Space Rastas. How awesome are Space Rastas?!
Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Wow. Since the release of the Blue Ant books, I've been telling people that Blue Ant is the place to start, as it updates a lot of the underlying themes of Sprawl for this decade. But Sprawl is still very current and relevant. If you read Sprawl during or before the dot-com bubble like I did, you probably focused on the prophetic internet stuff. If you read it again, you will find out that there is plenty more interesting stuff to feed your brain in Gibson's early novels.
William Gibson. The Bridge trilogy and the Sprawl trilogy, at a minimum. They still feel like maps to the future even now. You have to work at it, the map is not the territory after all, but the realisations about the impact of technology, progress, and the choices we make when we let society work a certain way have been profound, for me at least.
There's something I actually quite like about strange, dated sci-fi. I'll admit I really have only one strong example of it, and that is Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, but there's something fantastic about a world where information technology is scary and foreign, a world of digital phone booths and fax-newspapers, in which the internet is pervasive and deep, yet in other ways clunky and limited. It's a future arrived at by an alternate-present.
The sprawl (neuromancer etc) and the Jean le Flambeur (quantum thief) trilogies. Both are packed with very interesting concepts and characters.
Where it comes up
- Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012 2012 · 3 recommendations
- Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books? 2023 · 2 recommendations
- Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year? 2024 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: What are some of the best books you have read in 2022? 2022 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Favorite audio book for long drives? 2022 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Which books have you read more than once? 2020 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life? 2020 · 1 recommendation
- The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit) 2011 · 1 recommendation