It's funny, because I remember when I read this the first time, all sorts of incomprehension and mistakes jumbled together as I forced my way through. I loved the writing. I loved the writing, the setting, the sci-fi cool, the characters and the three intertwining plots, but in the end I barely had a clue what was going on. The Maas biotech stuff I got, sure, another high-tech maguffin, but the loa and their horses, despite having read Neuromancer and having it all laid out quite clearly in the book itself, I just couldn't work out what they were. The identity of the Boxmaker puzzled me, too. I think I assumed it was some sort of cruel mockery directed at Art and human presumption and pretensions. But Gibson was never anywhere near as cynical as cyberpunk the genre was supposed to be, even though the cynicism of the eighties forms part of the texture of the Sprawl novels. Instead, it is strange and lonely and brave and beautiful. 'My song is of time and distance. The sadness is in you.'

Count Zero is carefully plotted, precision engineered, fine-tuned, sleek and streetwise. Three plots: the mercenary Turner who specialises in corporate defections; Marly the art dealer ruined by scandal in Paris, and Bobby the Count, a would-be cowboy hit by lethal ice on his first run and saved by... something. Their stories turn around subterfuge and betrayal, the all-enveloping power of the monstrously rich and the strange interface of voodoo and cyberspace. It's a wild, thrilling ride, and it's a wonder to me that I can grasp now what eluded me then.