I think that the three stars I'm giving to this book are provisional at the moment, since, through no fault of the book itself, the story here never really gelled for me. The problem was that I was reading it in a very bitty way, with a chapter here or a few pages there, which never gave me enough time to hold enough of the story in my head to make things slot into place. At some point, I'll have to read it again more thoroughly and re-review it then.

Having said that, there's still a lot to admire here, from Gibson's marvellously imagined Sprawl, to his characters, tough and vulnerable. And the idea, pretty cutting edge for the time, of the (potentially quite literal) deux ex machina, the gods (well, AIs) in cyberspace, which are (maybe) remnants of the über-AI Neuromancer/Wintermute, that was formed in the previous novel in the sequence, Neuromancer. A lot of good ideas but a book that definitely requires more concentration than I gave it.