The devil is in the details, they say

Ooh, 3Jane is going to be really important if the book is taking almost a whole chapter to just exposit about her history. Especially when some of this was already in the first book, but you usually need to remind the reader about things like this if they’re going to be relevant going forward.

It also looks like we’ll be learning more about what the combined Neuromancer and Wintermute did once it got to the matrix.

But the thing is… The reader knows how they AI got there, roughly what the loa are and other details that Angie doesn’t. So, it would be boring to see Angie spend a lot of time to find mostly information that the reader knows or adding just details to what happened in the previous book.

It doesn’t seem like Prior had eyes on Mona the whole time she was out, this doesn’t seem like the reaction of someone who decided that now was the perfect time to get Mona out of there. My guess is that he had just found Mona, and went to get her back as soon as he found out where she was.

Based on this chapter I’m leaning on nobody thinking that Mona was going to go out, and them scrambling to find her when they realized that she had left the hotel room. No doubt they’re going to keep much more of an eye on her from now on, and Mona didn’t even get satisfying sex out of it.

It’ll be really interesting if Mona and Angie ever interact to see how Mona’s perception of Angie will change. Mona seems pretty naïve about how the entertainment industry works, but on the other hand from what we’ve seen Angie is a fundamentally decent person.

All the female point of view characters in this book are more or less stuck, aren’t they? I mean, Angie has had the most agency in her life regarding where she ended up (if she didn’t want to be famous she didn’t need to do it), but it really seems like she’s still somehow stuck.

I think that’s what’s being underlined in this chapter. Now, Kumiko’s case makes the most sense, she’s still underage and her father has many enemies who would use her against her father if they could. But that doesn’t make Kumiko like it, especially when she has people like Petal telling her what to do without explaining things. It really feels like Petal could give her more freedom or at least a feeling of it like Sally does, but Petal doesn’t actually care about Kumiko’s feelings.

So yeah, Gentry was not able to keep his exploration respectful, and ended up getting electrocuted. I don’t think this bodes well for Slick and company, even if it was Gentry’s own fault that went and poked at unfamiliar electronics and paid the price, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’s going to take the blame for what happened.

So, if Gentry’s alive and awake after this, Slick, Bobby and Cherry are getting kicked out. But there’s also the possibility that this could kill him, in which case the others could maybe hide his death for some length of time but inevitably it will come out. No doubt that Gentry’s doing something to keep the place running, and I doubt that there’s anyone else who knows everything that needs to be done.

I think there’s a deliberate contrast between the checkup Angie got, and the checkup that Mona got. The book seems to be building deliberate parallels between the two characters.

I was not expecting Tessier-Ashpool to be relevant again, after we heard that they had lost all their money in the previous book, but apparently we’re getting more lore. It even appears that 3Jane is still alive, although it appears that she’s dropped the “3” from her name. Most likely because she was the last clone alive, and there weren’t going to be any more clones, so it didn’t matter what her number was.

It could be really interesting if she had something to do with what’s going on around Angie. After all, even if she’s lost most of her money it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have connections that she could draw on, and after all she could be trying to get her money back, for whatever reason.

Poor Mona, she has no idea what’s going on around her. She doesn’t know who has the power in the situation, and how much she could or should ask for herself, and from whom. And that’s very dangerous.

I mean, she could make herself as small as possible and not do anything she isn’t told to do or ask for anything, but that could lead to the people around her taking advantage of her in a way they wouldn’t have if she was capable of advocating for herself. Also, she’d be missing out on experiences and things that she could have had.

It is possible that she would have been given a key to the door if she had just asked. On the other hand, it’s also possible that nobody sees her as a person with her own wants, and the door wasn’t locked because nobody considered that she would walk out of it, instead of her just straight out being allowed to leave if she pleases.

Depending on the size od the operation, there could be someone following her right now, making sure that she’s safe. It’s also possible that she’s high in an unknown city without a key to her room, with nobody looking for her yet.

“The LF, Kid called it. Called him the Count, called that his LF.”

Clearly LF stands for something, but I have no idea what. Maybe “life” something? It seems to be keeping Bobby alive, if nothing else. Whatever it is, it’s deliberately being kept hidden from the reader, so the answer can’t be that it’s just keeping Bobby from not dying.

The… time perception fuckery and memory erasure technology that they use against criminals sounds absolutely horrible. And I don’t know if it’s just a neat world building detail that the author came up with because Slick is the first criminal we see who’s gotten any kind of a punishment for his crimes (other than being killed by whoever was the victim of the crime) or if it will become relevant later. After all, we don’t know what’s going on with Bobby, and in some cases not remembering what happened can be a blessing.

Gentry’s burgeoning obsession could end up being a really good or a really bad thing. On one hand, if he’s being… respectful and doing things that won’t interfere with whatever’s going on with Bobby, it could be an avenue of giving the readers answers in a way that feels satisfying while letting the timeline move forward.

“He killed my mother,” she blurted[.]

Poor child. I still think there’s enough crumbs here that it would make sense that Kumiko is wrong about her father, but her learning independence when her father sends her away and finally rising against her father would also make a good story, so I’m in no way married to that idea.

“There’s another angle,” he said, “that came up today. They want it to look as though she’s been taken out.” “What?” “They want it to look as though we’ve killed her.”

Uh-huh. See, the first thing Kumiko is going to think is that whoever “they” are, they want Swain to fake Kumiko’s death. But we just saw in the previous chapter that Mona is needed for something where it’s important that she looks like Angie while she has no experience in show business.

What I’m saying is that there’s a real possibility that maybe someone wants Swain to fake Angie’s death. If it is Angie, there’s a possibility that the whole thing would be happening with her consent. Hell, even if it turns out that they’re talking about Kumiko it could be something that “they” want done for Kumiko’s own wellbeing. They were talking about faking her death after all.

Well, she didn’t have a last name herself, unless you counted Lisa, and that was more like having two first ones.

Interestingly Mona is the character who shares a name with the title of the book, the same way Bobby was in the previous book. I’m not going to read that much into it, as didn’t end up being overwhelmingly the most important character in the book or anything.

I do wonder if she’s in-universe deliberately named after the famous artwork. If she is, she doesn’t seem to know about it, but it’s very much possible that she has never had the chance to talk to her parents about her name.

It looks like the storylines of the characters are going to intersect much earlier than they did in the previous book, as whatever assignment Mona is being sent on is clearly connected to how she looks very much like Angie. Although it is possible that they’re going to hang out in the same location or near each other, but never interact.

Based on Angie’s feelings in the first chapter, I was expecting her to be held less voluntarily. Of course, she’s most likely seen more as an asset than as a human being, considering how Turner remembered his time as a bodyguard to a starlet, but there’s still a way that you can spin what’s happening as the production company keeping their star safe instead of blatant kidnapping,

I find Tessier-Ashpool being back interesting. In the previous book an AI fragment of Neuromancer and Wintermute had taken one of their space stations over, and the company had fallen apart otherwise, so my guess would be that an AI fragment or a few of them is holding most of the Tessier-Ashpool assets.

That should be good for Angie, right? We didn’t see how the majority of the Ais acting as lua actually see humans, but the actions of all the AIs we saw were basically benevolent or neutral towards the humans they were in extended contact with. And Angie, too has seemed to see the AIs in a positive light.

Oh wow, the book isn’t keeping the comatose mad being Bobby a secret at all. It did come to my mind that that was an option, I just would have expected it to be a mystery.

Of course, now the mystery is more about what happened to him. It looks like he did manage to become a cowboy, just the way he always wanted, so it’s possible that he got mixed up in some shady business. Kid Afrika doesn’t seem to be the most legitimate person to work with, and somehow he ended up with Bobby in his possession.

Angie didn’t talk about Bobby much in her first chapter, but that might have been to preserve the reveal to this chapter. It could also be that she doesn’t know what happened to him. Hell, it could be that she doesn’t know that something’s wrong, if he’s supposed to be doing something somewhere.

Cherry has only been with Bobby for a week, and we don’t know how long it took Kid Afrika to find her, whatever put Bobby into a coma could have just happened. And considering that Cherry and Slick don’t seem to be in a position to find out much, it would make sense for Angie’s storyline to be the one to tell us what happened to Bobby.

Poor Kumiko, she’s basically lost her whole family, as her mother killed herself and her father sent her away.

We don’t know what her relationship with her parents was like, other than her mother’s death has hit her hard, but considering that it’s her mother and how young she is, they could have had a complicated or distant relationship and it would still make sense for her mother’s suicide to be hard for Kumiko.

It’s also possible that everything we hear about her father here is true, that she was sent away because the yakuza is having internal conflicts, but I think it’s equally possible that her father wanted to get rid of her because she’s a painful reminder of his dead wife or because he’ll turn out to be evil or something.

Oof. If I have my reservations about the author writing a Japanese character, I’m definitely going to have reservations about him writing a sex worker. Honestly, I’m going to be very surprised if Mona ends up being handled with respect.

I mean, even in this first chapter we get a sex scene with her where she feels uncomfortable throughout the whole thing. And like… of course you can write about sex workers who are victimized, cyberpunk worlds are just the kind of world where basically nobody’s having a good time, but she needs to have some other attributes too.

I recognize that I’m most likely being somewhat harsh, considering that none of the new characters have gotten that much depth in their first chapters. Mona just falls straight into an extremely tired trope, and I’m already bored with it.

At least it looks like she’ll be changing scenery soon, so this might just have been a chapter to show what her life was like before whatever will happen to her in this book.

Well, I did say that I was expecting Angie to cameo in this book. Her becoming a point of view character was unexpected.

It means that we have a clear timeline on where we are compared to the previous book, and the storylines are no doubt going to be way more connected than the first two books. That’s actually pretty common in trilogies, the first book is more self-contained because it’s easier to sell a book that has an ending, and usually when the second book is written it’s clear that a third book is going to happen so there’s no danger of being unable to finish the series.

Speaking of racism. And like, sometimes you want to depict racism in your story, that’s a legitimate thing to do. That doesn’t mean that I need to like reading about it. I really hope that Little Bird isn’t going to be a central character, because I don’t want to either watch her be racist repeatedly or see an antiracist arc in my cyberpunk story about AIs and whatever’s going on with the unconscious guy.

Speaking of the guy, I be that he’s going to be the central point in Slick’s point of view chapters, if he becomes a recurring point of view character. I also can’t help but to notice that we learn very little about him. So, most likely he’ll be someone who’s introduced in another storyline, so that when we learn who he is it will actually be a reveal. That, or he’ll be a returning character from one of the previous books.

Okay, new book! Considering that the Ais were the connection between the two previous books, my first instinct is to try to guess where the Ais will turn up here. I can’t see them anywhere in the first chapter, but that makes sense as the point of the chapter seems to be to introduce Kumiko and her circumstances.

On one hand, considering the heavy Japanese influence that the setting has, having a Japanese point of view character makes sense, but on the other hand the author has been racist enough that I’m bracing myself for some weird blunders. But then again, I felt like the voodoo religion in the previous book felt like it was handled with at least medium amount of care, so maybe the author is capable of incorporating other cultures into his setting without too much racism.

But you do have to remember that as an European anime fan I have much more knowledge of the Japanese culture than African American diaspora religions.

I liked this book more than the previous one. Funnily enough, even though there were three point of view characters and all of them had storylines that only interacted with each other at the end, the book felt more coherent than the previous one.

I that’s because the world was already established in the previous book, so less time was taken just showing the reader cool things that the author came up with, and more focus was on the characters and the story.

That could also be because the genre of cyberpunk was more established during the few year between the first and second book and the author was able to rely more on genre convention. For example, because of Virek and the fact that Mitchell was being extracted from an abusive contract, the theme of money corrupting everything felt like it was present all the time instead of jumping in at the end like in the previous book.