William Gibson, author of the seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, once again drops readers into a future multiverse that boasts plausible, disconcerting advances in technology. On what should be a simple surveillance job in an immersive video game, Flynne Fisher accidentally witnesses a murder. She doesn't know it, but the game isn't a game--it's actually a future trajectory in Earth's history. Unidentified future entities with meddlesome and sometimes malicious intentions have tapped into Flynne's world via an undisclosed link in cyberspace.
It's only when people begin dying in Flynne's present time that she realizes she hadn't been in a game after all. To save their present from these interlopers, Flynne and her friends interact with a variety of good and not-so-good people in the future through robot-like entities, which are accessed in Flynne's time line via headsets printed with 3-D printers. Suspense builds in both worlds as people in each time frame try to avoid being killed.
In this rapid story that bounces from the near future to the distant future like a time-traveling Ping-Pong ball, money flows readily from one world to another, tattoos scuttle about on the skin, some people have double irises in their eyes and Lego pieces are cybernetically enhanced to move on their own. Gibson's details are sometimes sparse and his occasional odd turns of phrase might leave some readers confused, but for those willing to persevere through the vague (and sometimes quite complex) spots, the story succeeds in showing what might happen if humans stay on their current trajectory of drug use, medical manipulations, greed and hunger for power. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer