I just don't think Gibson is a good writer. A really flawed book: oddly paced, minimal and often confusing description, characters with one attribute, strangely flat climax, painfully corny epilogue. I hate the use of "shit" and "fuck" in dialogue, too. For a few years I was an occasional reader of the finance/news blog nakedcapitalism, which often referenced "the jackpot" in posts about environmental catastrophe, social collapse, disease epidemics etc. The passage about the jackpot, midway through the novel, is the best part of the book, and it's unfortunate that I had to read the other 400 pages to realize that it works just fine as an excerpt sans context!