overall? this book is just really boring. there are some good moments, but most of them are in the first few chapters, with only a few scattered through the rest of the book. by the middle of part 2, the interesting conceptual stuff re embodiment is more or less over, the previously close and relatively compelling third person narration has been dropped in favor of a weirdly clinical and distant third person, and the narrative becomes a series of disjointed incidents that are so rushed that they fail to be engaging or even cohere into a continuous narrative. much of the rest of the book feels like Gibson is killing time narratively — but to what end is never clear, not least because the heist that is the climax of the novel is never adequately explained to either the characters or the reader. you can feel that everything about the book is trying to be profound, but the result is more cloying and fake-deep than anything else.
(this is setting also aside the whole techno-orientalism thing, the misogyny, and also — less important as a critique but still irritating to me personally — the truly tedious heterosexuality.)
two thoughts I found myself returning to as I read it: “I’ve read Pacific Rim fanfiction that does a better job writing about embodiment than this does” and “why didn’t I just reread Fool’s Run instead of this?”. (I may, in fact, do that in the near future anyway.)
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