The setting of the novel is the not-so distant future, in the Chiba section of Tokyo, Japan. Technology has run rampant. Megacorporations battle for control of the global economy. Human Beings can now 'jack in' directly to the matrix, and shadowy groups of techno-criminals compete for power and money that the corps aren't exactly willing to let go of without a fight.

Case, an ex-hacker relocated from the BAMA - the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (a.k.a. 'The Sprawl'), the official term for the heavily-industrialized east coast of the United States), carves out an desperate existence moving illegal pharmaceutical materials for money.

He had been a talented career hacker, cracking corporate systems on the matrix for crime syndicates, but his downfall began when he attempted to steal from his employers, and they found out. In return, they dosed him with a special mycotoxin that deprived him of his ability to ever enter the matrix again. They let him keep the money he had embezzled from them, and he spent the rest of his funds in various illegal 'black' clinics in an attempt to undo the damage.

One night, wired to the rafters on amphetamines and understandingly paranoid, he notices someone following him. This turns out to be a hired street samurai, known to him as 'Molly'. She was an ex-prostitute and razor girl hired to find him for a very special employer, who wants him for a high-level matrix run. This new employer offers a great deal of money, and throws in the tempting stipulation of repairing his disabled mind. It is an offer that he just can't refuse....

Study Guide for William Gibson: Neuromancer(1984)
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/neuromancer.html

...Turner is a shadowrunner in a technology-driven, dark future. He makes a living extracting top corporate employees from their unwilling employers. During one of his jobs in New Delhi, an automatic, mobile, pheremone-seeking bomb (dubbed a slamhound) blows him to smithereens. His employers surgically reconstruct him from scratch based on his old medical records, and he is given a new contract - to get Dr. Christopher Mitchell, a top scientist from a Mass-Biotech arcology compound on the US/Sonora border in New Mexico.

Count Zero (a.k.a. Bobby Newmark) is a newbie hacker living with his mother in Barrytown, NJ. He has a loose connection with a 'ware dealer in the Barrytown projects. This contact gives him system cracking software (an icebreaker) and a target.

When he jacks in and attempts to break into the system, the security on the site activates and starts to fry his brain. He is rescued by an entity in the matrix, an entity that is actually the daughter of Dr. Mitchell.

Meanwhile, Marly Krushkova is a once-disgraced art dealer specializing in Cornell box constructions. She is hired by Josef Virek, an eccentic and wealthy figure, to find the maker of a series of Cornell-like boxes.....

Paoli Soleri Arcology information
http://www.arcosanti.org

Artchive
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cornell.html

Artcyclopedia
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/cornell_joseph.html

the-artists.org
http://www.the-artists.org/ArtistView.cfm?id=8A01F2A1-BBCF-11D4-A93500D0B7069B40

Catharton
http://www.catharton.com/artists/45.htm

At the start of this story, we meet Kumiko Yanaka. She is a the quiet, thirteen-year old daughter of a high-ranking member of the Yakuza. After her estranged mother's suicide, and a deadly wave of Yakuza infighting, Kumiko is flown from Tokyo to London to be taken care of by one of her father's associates. She is also given a very advanced pocket AI as a companion.

Meanwhile, in an abandoned factory in an area known as Dog Solitude (A post-industrial wasteland in New Jersey), Slick Henry and Little Bird are visited by Kid Afrika, a friend of Slick Henry's who needs a past favor returned. The favor consists of housing a dubious nurse named Cherry Chesterfield and a seemingly comatose character by the name of Count Zero (from the last novel), who is strapped to a stretcher and connected to a mysterious box.

In Malibu, CA, simsense-star Angie Mitchell has undergone rehabilitation from a custom synthetic drug. She is nearing the end of her recovery and is eager to restart work.

Mona is a dancer and call girl from Cleveland. She is addicted to the latest stimulant craze dubbed 'wiz'. Mona's boss, Eddy has her working the street in Florida, when he shows up at the squat one morning, excited about a new gig that he has found for her. The interested party is a talent scout from London, looking for a special actress...

Full Text Version of Mona Lisa Overdrive.

1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century aheah of its time. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history - and the future: Sybil Gerard - fallen woman, politician's tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator; Edward Oliphant - diplomat, mystic, and spy. Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose. Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for....

Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine is the first collaborative novel by two of the most brilliant and controversial science fiction authors of our time. Provocative, compelling, intensely imagined, it is a startling extension of Gibson's and Sterling's unique visions - in a new and totally unexpected direction!

The Difference Dictionary by Eileen Gunn -
http://www.sff.net/people/gunn/dd/

In L.A., Berry Rydell was once a police officer. After using deadly force in an inappropriate manner, he is fired, and takes on a cop-for-hire position at Intensecure. One day, he and his partner respond to an emergency call that turns out to be an elaborate hoax, and he is released from the job.

Chevette Washington is a bicycle courier riding for the Allied service San Francisco. She lives on the top of the Golden Gate bridge with Skinner. The Bridge is now a shantytown-like home to businesses and residences. During a party at a hotel, which was one of her stops, she impulsively steals a pair of glasses from a man who is harassing her.

Rydell, now looking for work with little success, takes a job offer in San Francisco that involves driving around a couple of heavy 'skip tracers' who are looking for the stolen pair of glasses.

A researcher from Osaka University's Sociology department, Yamazaki, has an apartment in San Francisco. He is researching the denizens of the Bridge, and Skinner is his local guide.

Rydell's new employers convince him that Chevette is in some kind of sacrificial, satanic cult. He is sent to The Bridge to find her. He begins to suspect that his employers have not been completely on the level, and these suspicions are confirmed when they try to kill Chevette to get the glasses. Rydell and Chevette get away from them into San Francisco, eventually making their way to Los Angeles to expose the crooked cops and the secret of the glasses...

Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive American design consultant with an international reputation. In London to evaluate the redesign of a corporate logo, she's offered a very different assignment: find the creator of the haunting, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the internet by a party or parties unknown. Followers of this footage, and Cayce herself is one, are generating massive underground buzz, worldwide - and her new employer values buzz infinitely more than money.

But with her London apartment burgled, her email hacked, and the records of her Manhattan therapist stolen, she begins to suspect that more is at stake here, to someone, than she could ever have imagined.

Still, Cayce id her father's daughter. Win Pollard, Cold War security guru, was never a man to be deterred by the unimaginable. But the Cold War is over, and Win is missing, presumed dead, somewhere in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Cayce is soon phase-shifting through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, and finally into the eerie aftermath of a Soviet eco-disaster, she follows the implications of a secret as disturbing, and compelling, as the twenty-first century promises to be.

A secret that may, ultimately, belong to her alone.

Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.

Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.

Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.

Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.