… but was it a good cliffhanger 
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The audiobook is excellent. I assume it’s out there in a legit & legal form, but mine was digitized from a cassette tape, with the files named like Tape 1 side A. I have bought enough audiobooks in the years since to assuage my guilt from piracy in the 90s.
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One of the things about the Blue Ant trilogy is that they were meant to belong to the year they were released. The protagonist from Pattern Recognition lost her father in the World Trade Center, for example, and Gibson was exploring how the rapid advances in technology changed us.
I am a huge, huge fan of his writing because the tech is not nearly as important as the people. He has a gift for exploring how alien and now relatable we can be at the same time. The man is a master craftsman, a true word artist.
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Thoughts after reading all the comments:
- New Rose Hotel was a fantastic film adaptation of Gibson that no one knows about.
- Snow Crash was fun and silly; Neuromancer is a beast.
- Whoever mentioned the Bridge Trilogy was dead on - it would adapt to the screen much better.
- In 1984 a sky the color of a dead channel would be static gray, not blue.
- I had to google palimpsest
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I only watched New Rose a few years ago!
I often think of the TV image at the beginning of Neuromancer and think it was always silly!
I mean palimpsest not in its original sense of a text which has been erased to reuse vellum but rather in the literary sense of a pre-existing text or draft which informs the published text but which is no longer present and can only be inferred.
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Gibson is one of our greatest writers, period. It goes Chandler, Gibson, McCarthy (for me at least). His prose is stunning. It doesn’t matter that the Sprawl stories have been ripped off by everything since. A faithful adaptation will still be amazing - faithful mind you.
Regardless, read the book it’s really good (yes better than Snow Crash)
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For the Gibson-curious, you can read chapter one here. It’s been years since I read it, and I’d forgotten how sharp the dialogue and narration is.
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I always thought this was a great example of 1) how poorly we can predict the mundane changes of technology over time
2) How we probably ain’t interpreting elements older literature properly because something minor has shifted over time.
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I find it fascinating that newer generations reading the book for the first time may well imagine a lovely blue sky which is certainly not what Gibson intended.
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Not just a lovely blue sky, but a quiet blue sky. Not a roaring, hissing grey sky.
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The sky above the port was the color and sound of the HBO logo.
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Ha, the last time I saw Stalker in the theatre when it was done a woman near me said to her partner “I think I just watched nothing happen for three hours…but I liked it?”
But, oh, the highway scene in Solaris…
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Everything old is new again. My LG TVs refuse to turn on to anything other than the static of a “live broadcast” that isn’t there.
… I’ve never read “Snow Crash” but it always sounds like a parody of Gibson
It’s like people debating whether “Star Wars” is as good as “Spaceballs” or not 
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I’ve only read the Baroque cycle by Stephenson, honestly… I think… I dunno, years of grad school and endless non-fiction fried my brain.
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That’s really good, but I think his best work is the Diamond Age. I think you might like that one. And if you liked the Baroque Cycle, I would recommend Cryptonomicon. It’s connected to that series…sort of. If you are into linguistics, read Anathem. I’m currently trying to finish Seven Eves, but I’m having trouble getting into it.
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I might try to read Cryptonomicon due to the connection with Baroque cycle… Right now I’m reading Parable of the Sower… And I have a big ass stack of non-fiction!
My better half liked Seven Eves, so I might try that too (he’s big into sci-fi…).
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