I finished Neuromancer half a year ago; only yesterday did I feel like picking up this book.
The book itself isn't long — more of a novella? You can finish it in a few hours. The translation is a bit crap; I even spotted typos at the start. Don't make me learn English... Three plotlines run in parallel, so the beginning is a bit confusing, but you get it soon enough. Just take the story as it comes.
The first line that opens up is Turner the hired gun. He's killed in New Delhi, rebuilt by the Dutchman, then takes another job and walks into the main plot.
The second line is Marly, shamed for selling forgeries in Paris, then hired by the rich man Virek to find the maker of a wooden box in a collection. This line isn't that tightly tied to the other two. It has a bit of a relationship with Neuromancer; you could say it's a line over the other two. Feels more like it exists as a reveal, and also a bit random...
The third line is Bobby, Count Zero. He uses the icebreaker from "Two-a-Day" to break into some database and nearly gets killed; "the Madonna" saves him. He goes to "Two Days Two Nights" to figure out what's going on, and that's how he enters the main plot. I don't think Count Zero actually gets that much writing. Three lines in parallel, and he only belongs to one of them; even in that line he's at most pushing the plot along with the other characters. I don't really get why the book is called Count Zero (originally Count Zero Interrupt). Maybe they just wanted a sci-fi-sounding title so it would sell.
Halfway through I got this feeling: everyone is a gear turning on some precision machine. Call the machine the world, or fate — maybe personal will doesn't exist. There's no protagonist. Everyone is a gear, driven by other gears, driving other gears, all of them turning the world / fate together.
The author really loves describing objects, laying out every item in the environment. Some people call that a fetish (lol).
I like this one more than Neuromancer. The later plot of Neuromancer just makes you want to skip: everything is already clear, and the story still won't shut up. It should end like this one, once things have been laid out.
The centipede-like thing in Count Zero that you stick on skin to heal wounds shows up in Blade Runner 2049. So that's where it came from.
Reading a novel is like entering another world. We bring something back from that world with our own experience. Looking forward to the next world, and to what we bring back from it.