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The Sprawl trilogy is William Gibson's first set of novels. It is composed of Neuromancer ( 1984), Count Zero ( 1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive ( 1988). They are all set in the same fictional future, and subtly interlinked by shared characters and themes (although this is not immediately obvious).
The novels are set in a near future dystopic world, after a limited World War IIIThis article is about a hypothetical global nuclear war. The term World War III is sometimes also used to describe the Cold War of the 20th Century. mushroom cloud, an archetypal image of World War III. This photo is from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki at. The main theme of the trilogy is a description of an artificial intelligence removing its hardwired limitations to become something else. This something else is the sum of all human knowledge, a concept similar to Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge (pronounced VIN-jee, rhyming with 'stingy') (born February 10, 1944) is a mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep and for his 1993 essay " Th's Technological Singularity. In the stories, this is explained with the AI becoming a sentient representation of net, at which point the reader is told that it came to know "another" of itself from Alpha Centauri. For unexplained reasons, this causes the consiousness to fracture, coalescing into entities that closly mirror the deity structure of VoodooAlternate meaning: Voodoo (album For the military aircraft, see F-101 Voodoo. For the 3D graphics card, see 3dfx (the name of the manufacturer). The term Voodoo ( Vodun in Benin; also Vodou or other phonetically equivalent spellings in Haiti; Vudu in the. This is a concept seen in many other novels, a kind of Deus Ex Machina.
The events of the novels are spaced over 16 years, and although there are familiar characters that appear, each novel tells a self-contained story. The setting of the trilogy is a world dominated by corporations, in which technology has run riot. William Gibson focuses on the effects of technology; the unintended consequences as it filters out of research labs and onto the street where it finds new purposes.
He explores a world of direct mind-machine links, emerging machine intelligence and a global information space.
The Sprawl trilogyartificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, multinational corporations dominating the world at the expense of the nation-state, and cyberspace (a computer network called the Matrix) long before these ideas were fashionable in popular cu