The end of a saga. Gibson has done it again. So many questions unanswered; so many ends left up to wonder. The obscurity just adds to the book's essence. Now all I need is a fancy French word and some notoriety and I'll have successfully written a blurb! This book deserves every praise it gets. Gibson is not a rhapsody of the modern era; he is the rhapsody of the future. All the threads of his tale weave together into one. Each moment, each heartbeat, in this trilogy should not be overlooked. Blink, miss one word, and you'll be left in the dark. In his final work of the Sprawl Trilogy Gibson manages to test your comprehension. Each reference is but a subtle hint to his past works. Each event, no matter how small, brings new light to Gibson's world. The forces of the matrix are at work, and the fate of humanity is yet again within its grasp.
New characters, enthralling as the old, and old characters, hidden in the shadows, everyone is destine for something. Taking chaos theory to a whole new level Gibson manages to intertwine all of his colorful characters into his magnificent story. Angie Mitchell, now an up and coming Sense/Net star, is still haunted by the voodoo gods of the matrix. After avoiding their pressures with drugs, the now sober girl must face their presence again. Her ability to jack-in to the matrix without a deck has been kept a secret but with her companion Bobby gone she sees little hope. Bobby is entombed within a aleph, a miniature network separate from the matrix but like a matrix in-itself. He seeks to find the meaning of The Change. He is trapped within this aleph with the construct of 3Jane. Meanwhile, a SINless (Single Identification Number, much like a digital SSN, without one you officially do not exist to the corporations or governments) girl named Mona is taken for a roller coaster ride, as her life is turned head over heels. She is taken by a shadowy Yakuza mobster and is surgically altered to look like the Sense/Net star Angie Mitchell. The razorgirl Molly is back in the street-samurai business and is working for the Yakuza. She's been blackmailed into a plot to kidnap a famous Simstim star, but the blackmail has all to much information. Things no one but a vengeful 3Jane would know. But Molly, under the alias Sally, will have none of it.
The matrix has plans, and no one will get in its way. When the Aleph is fused with the matrix a cylinder of light appears above the matrix's virtual Sprawl. The cylinder turns into a sky of white. What exactly happens is left up to your imagination, but the reasons for it are explained in the last chapter. When the matrix became aware of itself, The Change in which the AI Wintermute fused with its other to become omnipresent, it also became aware of another matrix far away. This wall of light is a connection to that matrix in the Centauri System. Yet Gibson leaves us to wonder. The matrix is the sum of all human data, so this other matrix isn't human.
The book is just another statement of Gibson's creative genius. He weaves a tale like no other . A roller-coaster ride, where every event, every moment, every second, counts. Each one a heartbeat in Gibson's world. Don't blink. Don't miss a beat.