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Count Zero

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Count Zero

By: William Gibson
Narrated by: Kyle Soller, Alix Wilton Regan, Sebastián Sebastián Capitán Viveros
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Summary
 They set a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the colour of his hair.
When the Maas Biolabs and Hosaka zaibatsus fight it out for world domination, computer cowboys like Turner and Count Zero are just foot soldiers in the great game: useful but ultimately expendable.
When Turner wakes up in Mexico - in a new body with a beautiful woman beside him - his corporate masters let him recuperate for a while, then reactivate his memory for a mission even more dangerous than the one that nearly killed him: the head designer from Maas Biolabs says he wants to defect to Hosaka, and it's Turner's job to deliver him safely.

Count Zero is a rustbelt data-hustler totally unprepared for what comes his way when the designer's defection triggers war in cyberspace. With voodoo gods in the Net and angels in the software, he can only hope that the megacorps and the super-rich have their virtual hands too full to notice the amateur hacker with the black market kit trying desperately to stay alive . . .©1986 William Gibson (P)2025 W.F. Howes Ltd. Adventure Hard Science Fiction Humorous Science Fiction Software
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A thoughtful and engaging story made up, as typical for Gibson, of three parallel plots each with a different viewpoint character. For the audio book version, each viewpoint is narrated by a different reader. This is where this version suffers, however, as one of the readers is not as good as the other two. He is clearly trying for a particular style to suit the material, but it sounds intrusive and is frequently unclear and distracting. It made those chapters hard to listen to after a while. It would be better to have one high quality narrator do all three viewpoints.

great story held back by inconsistent narrator performance.

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This is a disappointing production of one of my favourite Gibson novels. Using three voices was a great idea and worked well for the most part (Turner was excellent) but some of the accents (Paco) and character delivery (Finn) were objectively off. The Bobby narration was also sloppy at times - mispronounced heteronyms and character accents bleeding into non-speaking parts - which distracted from the story. Hopefully the producer takes more care with Mona Lisa Overdrive!

Disappointing production

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One of the male voices was pretty bad at times - timing would ignore phrasing and punctuation; accents would continue after a character had finished speaking. Made it a hard listen and caused me to frequently switch to reading. I probably listened to only ~25%, which is significantly less than I had intended.

Very average performance.

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For the most part the reading is pretty good, the sound is clean and the readers are understandable. There are however, some very confusing, very unprofessional aspects. Occasionally the audio cuts into what I can only assume is a retake of a reading that was very, very poorly recorded or recorded on a horrible microphone, the sound is blown out as if the signal is well over the upper threshold of the recording interface, distorting the audio. Additionally there are some simply ridiculous common mispronunciations of very simple words. For example the man reading for Bobby’s parts pronounced what I can only assume is supposed to be “cinnamon” and “synonym” which is a common mispronunciation, but because it’s so common it’s exactly the kind of thing I would not expect from a professional. It’s something I would expect to get caught almost instantly because HOW common that mispronunciation is. It’s not some obscure word that the editors might not even know the correct pronunciation of.

Overall it’s quite good, but a series of small, very simple errors make it feel very amateur at times.

Somewhat unprofessional reading

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Avoid this book. Common words are mispronounced; minute(time) vs minute(size), of vs off etc. The editing is truly horrible, and ends up ruining the story. The only reason I haven't refunded yet was so I could write this review. Appalling work.

Worst production I've ever heard

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