I felt like half the book had gone by before I had an idea of what was really going on (and then I realized it was more like a quarter of the book because this was actually really long for a Gibson book) because Gibson doesn’t explain anything, and his characters don’t really pause to examine why they’re doing what they’re doing (and some of them are really weird). You eventually figure out that the people from the present world (a postapocalyptic climate future, for us) have reached back to their past and opened a line of communication, thus affecting events and splitting off an alternate timeline, except all this is done via electronic communications so it’s almost like both sides are playing video games with real people. (For a bit I thought that was actually the case near the beginning, that some of them were AI. It’s not a friendly start.) I got into it eventually, particularly liking the interactions between the two main narrators, but overall I found this jumpy and more confusing than it needed to be.