Zsenicorpse wrote:

It's tough being an ideas man. It's even worse if your aesthetic progenitor is Stanislaw Lem. "...A pig saddled with a conscience..." Man, that's an act you don't need to be following.

I think Gibson's problem is that he's a great observer and a great ideas guy, but not a great author. All that cool-ass shit, and he keeps muffing it on pat situations, plots, characters - bright young kids, murder mysteries without the murders, standard potboiler fare. Someone else should have taken his ideas and written his book for him, kind of a singers/songwriters affair. I wish that was done more often, because sometimes the idea guys aren't good novelists and the good novelists aren't good idea guys. Instead we're stuck with Alan Dean Foster writing Total Recall and not much else.