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Mona Lisa Overdrive

Discuss the types of reality rendered in the works you read and watched for this week's assignment. Describe the effects of this reality on the narrative and the implications for the presumed reader. 


Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson is a multi-narrative science fiction novel that takes place in what seems like the distant future. Like many other novels of this genre, the reader is thrown in without explanation and is constantly trying to keep up and figure out what's happening. While this was new and intriguing at the beginning of the novel, I found this very hard to follow throughout and stay interested in. The realities in this novel seem very convoluted and obscure, with terms like cyberspace and stims filling the scene. Every narrative in this novel has a completely different setting, and tone that for a long time in the book it seems as though they are not connected at all. I think that the effects of this technologically enhanced reality opens a lot of ideas for the reader, and can give lots of interest in the continuation of the novel as well as the genre. However, with the fact that the novel throws you into multiple narratives at once without explanation of the terms associated with this distant reality, makes it harder to be relatable and less easy to follow. Since a large portion of this novel is focused on the fact that it has multiple narratives and perspectives, one could say that the novel in itself has multiple realities. Each person presents their own reality, which in turn results in many different things going on at once. I think that the idea of different realities coming together to form one giant one that somehow connects is a good one, and if there are more characters, there's more of a chance someone will relate to at least one of them in some way. Overall, this novel was difficult for me to follow and stay interested in, especially if I didn't read it for a couple days since it would be even more confusing to try and pick it back up.

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