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.

At Comic-Con last year, Ray Bradbury named Greg Bear as an up-and-coming sci-fi writer to watch, as he had sort of mentored him after he came up to him at a signing and asked to correspond with him when he (Bear) was a boy.

At Comic-Con last year, Ray Bradbury named Greg Bear as an up-and-coming sci-fi writer to watch,

I think Bear has established himself as more than up-and-coming, though I'm sure that's Bradbury's perspective since he mentored Bear.

But Bear's been publishing regularly since the early eighties.

Yeah, he said he'd won more awards than he had, and that we probably knew him. But I'd never heard of him.

I think Bradbury meant it as a joke...

In an odd bit of synchronicity, a friend of mine will be chatting live with Greg Bear over on Gather later this month.