Book 37 - William Gibson "Virtual Light"

[jazzy_dave]

William Gibson - Virtual Light (Penguin)




I actually stared this book a few months back and got as far as the fifth chapter. Then for some reason I mislaid it. I only started picking up on this after completing the Zafon book and been reading it in the garden yesterday and finished this morning.. I have read his books before , particularly Neuromancer and Count Zero, as I have been a fan of the cyberpunk side of sci-fi for years. Mona Lisa was the last one I read a couple of years back.

Virtual Light is a thrilling read, not quite a tour-de-force as the story is almost incidental in places, the characters forgettable compared to those in Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive - but for once, that is not the point. Virtual Light demonstrated Gibson's uncanny ability to see through the fog of the present and show us the future as it is. The neoliberal agenda is all set out in there for anyone to read, in precise detail and gruesome technicolor. Reads like the history of 2010, but was written in 1992.

Virtual Light, about a pair of virtual reality glasses and San Francisco after the next big quake. Rydell and Chevette are brilliant inventions, and a near-future world where people live in shanty towns on the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge and vehicles have alarms that tell people to 'back the f**k off' .

This book was written in 1992-93. Reading it now from the perspective of 2012 gives you a shock. How could Gibson so accurately have drawn our present when it was his future? Late in the story, he describes a place that went downhill "when the Euromoney went away..." and I shuddered. SF is not supposed to be predictive, but what seemed like a dystopian vision in 1993 reads like a techno-thriller now - indeed, an inattentive reader might think of it as a contemporary novel