Zero History | B-

Popularity comes in degrees and, while some things are just destined for fame, others are meant for cult devotion. For every 20 people whose eyes light up at the name of The Beatles or Saw, only a couple will shine for The Pixies or Let The Right One In. This is true of art, food, music and just about everything else.

As novice readers of William Gibson's Zero History will discover, it's pretty true of science fiction as well. The story is an espionage thriller that has us following punk-princess-turned-detective Hollis Henry and the ex-addict Milgrim. They work together to root out a secret underground brand of anti-fashion clothing at the behest of Hubertus Bigend, the wealthy head of a marketing agency who isn't happy to have competition. Gibson, whose newly semi-classic novel Neuromancer established him as a founding father of cyberpunk sci-fi, is not one to take us into his genre by holding our hands and wading us through the warm, shallow waters of characterization and scene-setting. Rather, the expository details are delivered in the blink of an eye and we find ourselves splashing around the deep end before we even know it.

The language does a fantastic job of painting the complexity and color of an information-age world. Open to page one, and you'll find a car that's "pearlescent silver … glyphed in Prussian blue" and "a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic fawn." And that's just in paragraph two. Although the story technically takes place in the present or a time very close to it, it is very much a product of its writer's home-genre. Weird science, information overload and far-reaching mega-corporations are all very much the rule of the day in this book, even if that day is our own.

A good way to tell whether you'll enjoy this book is to ask yourself what the word "cyberpunk" means to you. If you've heard the term and dabble in some sci-fi standards like Asimov and Bradbury, you're probably better off going back to Neuromancer to get your feet wet. True genre-philes might want to start with Pattern Recognition, the first book of the unofficial trilogy that Zero History belongs to. On the other hand, if all you know of science fiction comes from overhearing Battlestar Galactica DVDs that your comp-sci roommate plays in the background, be warned. You may not be ready for this brave new world.