Cayce Pollard is an expensive, extremely intuitive market-research consultant, a “dowser” of international marketing. She identifies market patterns, that is, she proposes products that she believes will be highly marketable.
When her apartment is burgled and her computer is hacked, she realizes that there are things behind this that are not visible at first glance…
William Gibson was born in the United States in 1948. He grew up in Virginia, where, after the death of his father, he was introduced to the Beat movement and science fiction.
In 1968, during the Vietnam War era, he moved to Canada to avoid military conscription, and he has lived there ever since.
His first published work was Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977). In 1986, his short story collection Burning Chromewas released, which includes “Johnny Mnemonic”, later adapted into a film starring Keanu Reeves.
Gibson gained widespread fame with his “Sprawl Trilogy”: Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Neuromancer won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards and became a cornerstone of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction.
He is often regarded as a “prophet” of the Internet and the World Wide Web. His works, as well as those of writers influenced by him, depict a dark futuristic world in which real power lies in the hands of multinational corporations, and the most valuable commodity is information stored in computers connected through a vast virtual network known as cyberspace.
In this world, daring individuals connect their brains directly to the network in order to steal information—entering a digital realm that is as real and tangible to them as physical reality, but full of lethal dangers.
In 1990, he co-authored The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling. In 1993, he published Virtual Light. Throughout the 1990s, Gibson produced the “Bridge Trilogy”. In 1996 came Idoru, followed by All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), Pattern Recognition (2003), and Spook Country (2007).
The Online Forum in full action. 9/11, the Americans, the Russians, the Cypriots, commercial brands, antique computers, the way in which new buying trends and other contemporary “cultural” goods are recognized and imposed in a war waged through the Internet, nullifying time, distance, the past and the future.