Book 2 in what I will refer to has the "Blue Ant Crawl" trilogy (although Book 3 has yet to surface and Gibson is 59, I'm thinking there will be a third). This book like the previous book, Pattern Recognition, is some of his best work since Neuromancer (the in between trilogy never worked for me). I actually find it hard to believe that Pattern Recognition was written in 2003! Four years later Gibson is back at it with a new set of characters and one being prodded by Mr Bigend (recurring character). This book reads like a SF Ludlum spy thriller although it isn't as intense or dense as you'd find in a Ludlum. The intertwindness of the plot and the characters are well defined and the neat tidy ending makes for a well written tale. I have found that you don't really read Gibson so much for the story but for the concepts, the metaphors, and the underlying hipness. Reading the book makes everything he says "cool". I finish his novel and a feel a bit more attuned to the future, a little hipper, and maybe a bit more like I just came down from a drug induced high. Good quotes:"Cities, in Milgrim's experience, had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning. There was a sort of basic fuckedness index to be read, then, in faces that hadn't yet encountered the reality of whatever they were on their way to do." - page 260
"...daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into ever image he encountered them in." - page 97
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