Neuromancer was a revelation to me, but it started to seem like Gibson was continuing to write in that universe because that's what people expected. Pattern Recognition was thoroughly awesome abd made me love him again.

-t is me. I read Neuromancer when it first came out, and it was one of the few times I realized that I had seen the birth of something new. I was about to give up on Gibson after several books of well-written pointlessness and then Pattern Recognition came along.

leaden characters

Oh yeah. I could never really grok Case at all. He just seemed to be The Protagonist, with no real personality to speak of.

poorly written action sequences (it's all but impossible to tell what's going on in many of them)

Heh. Yeah, I had to re-read a few of them several times to figure out what the hell happened. It's like he didn't want to tell me the important stuff. Sometimes it felt like he was really concerned with being A Writer.

Pattern Recognition was thoroughly awesome abd made me love him again.

The concept for that book sounds really cool.

Oh yeah. I could never really grok Case at all. He just seemed to be The Protagonist, with no real personality to speak of.

As much as he's the center of attention and all, I consider Molly Millions to be the best character. She has more depth and more interesting motivation than Case ever does. Her back story is all in Johnny Mnemonic.

I also dug Slick Henry in Mona Lisa Overdrive. I thought he was a well-developed character. And Bobby Newmark in Count Zero cracked me up.

But, yeah...Case was a blank.

I consider Molly Millions to be the best character. She has more depth and more interesting motivation than Case ever does.

Oh, yeah, she was more interesting, for sure. But I was sort of miffed and confused that she has these awesome Wolverine claws and never uses them in the book ever.

Her back story is all in Johnny Mnemonic.

Which is so cool! I didn't realize that was the "Johnny" she was talking about. Thank you, Wikipedia. That sort of thing makes me want to read a bunch of Gibson to catch what happens with all the other characters and stuff.

But, yeah...Case was a blank.

I'm glad it wasn't just me. Like, he was a console cowboy...who really loved this Linda Lee chick for some reason and...he would do jobs for money but didn't have any real emotion about it.

I find most of Gibson's characters to be two-dimensional.

It was almost shocking to read Pat Cadigan and find really interesting, complex characters in a cyberpunk setting.

Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired is also pretty good cyberpunk. But, again, the main character, Cowboy, is kind of an emotional blank. He does things he's passionate about, but somehow the passion never actually comes across.

I noticed the same things about his characters in Angel Station as well.

Let me deviate briefly from this cyberpunk survey to share an interesting interview with Patrick McGrath about the gothic literary sensibility.

Back to cyberpunk: Has anybody read Greg Bear's Queen of Angels?

I loved it but nobody ever talks about it.

Yep, I've read it a couple of times. Love Greg Bear.