Johnny Mnemonic

I found the story to be quite confusing and didn't understand that much of it. However, I could recognize William Gibson's style and I know that the story will make more sense once I read it a few more times. I recognized the female character Molly from his novel Neuromancer, since she also features there. I read Neuromancer a few years ago and should read it again because I found it very interesting and again, I'm sure it would make more sense if I read it once more. William Gibson's writing is very scientific, complex and cyberpunkish, with many lapses in time and non-linear jumps from one thing to another, which makes it difficult to understand the first time around - or even the first few times. The world he paints up in his novels and short stories is very high-tech and all the characters in it take many of these technological things for granted, which means that there are few explanations of what exactly is happening.

The main character Johnny basically seems to be a sort of cyborg who stores information in his head and other people pay for memory space in his brain. The gist of the story seems to be that one of Johnny's clients stored something in his brain and then did not seek him out to retrieve the information. When Johnny seeks out this client to find out why he hasn't collected his info, he gets into trouble and realizes that the information in his brain is dangerous and that someone has stolen it from the Yakuza and his client put it in Johnny's head and then, after realizing that the information is dangerous, sought out some people to kill off Johnny and get rid of the problem. Johnny manages to stay alive with the help of Molly who knows people, Johnny's client is killed by the maffia, and Johnny is dragged away by Molly to figure out what's inside his brain and how to make a deal with the Yakuza and manage to stay alive for a little bit longer.

All ends well, the maffia ends up leaving him alone and Johnny manages to hide away and change his appearance through extensive surgery and memory alterations. Not your traditional happy ending, but that's as good as it gets in a William Gibson story.

- Eve.