First time I read Virtual Light by William Gibson I liked it,
but I didn't appreciate it as much as it deserved. Only
after Pattern
Recognition and the current series I realized just how good the
whole Bridge
Trilogy really is. To me the path towards Pattern Recognition is
evident in every chapter, hinted in every reference. While waiting for
the Zero
History release I decided to buy the whole bridge series and read
it again. I'm half way through now, and I'm loving every page of it. I
was born too late to really
appreciate Neuromancer
anyway, it never influenced me, not like it did the previous
generation. It wasn't even what introduced me to cyberpunk, it was
Neal
Stephenson's Snow Crash instead. Maybe that's the reason
I love Gibson's recent work so much, his amazing portrayal of the
present, his ability to spot patterns and nodal
points where nobody else does... bits of the literal future right
here, right now.
Virtual Light is set in the year 2005. Tokyo is recovering from a huge
earthquake, and the society as a whole from AIDS. This is where we
meet Chevette Washington, a bike courier. She lives on the
San Francisco Bay Bridge, where squatters have built
settlements. Visiting San Francisco, the bridge and Chevette's
roommate (Skinner, a bridge veteran) is Yamazaki, a
student of sociology from Japan. Another character is Rydell,
a security guy and former policemen, who is brought in to help
investigate a theft of VR glasses. Which just so happen were stolen by
Chevette, on an impulse.
The second book, Idoru, finds Rydell working for hotel
security where he befriends a guest, Colin Laney, a data
analyst. Laney has a singular gift - he can intuitively spot trends
developing within masses of seemingly unrelated data. Through
Yamazaki, who is now in Tokyo, Rydell finds a new job for Laney. The
assignment is for Lo/Rez - the hottest rock band on
earth. The lead signer has just announced that he intends to
marry Rei Toi, a software agent and Japanese
idoru. Chia, a member of a Lo/Rez fan club from Seattle,
travels to Tokyo to visit the local chapter of the fan-club and find
out if rumors about the wedding are true.
The third book sees the culmination of all these events, and although
All Tomorrow's Parties includes many of the same characters,
it's not a direct sequel to either. The book offers its own story
line, and is perhaps the best of the three. Laney can now see
significant "nodal points" in the vast streams of data in the
worldwide computer network, and he owes this gift to an experimental
drug he received during his youth. Such nodal points are rare but
significant events in history that forever change society, even though
they might not be recognizable as such when they occur. Laney isn't
quite sure what's going to happen when society reaches this latest
nodal point, but he knows it's going to be big, and he knows it's
going to occur in San Francisco. On the Bay Bridge.
What happens when we reach the nodal point? Finding out is a perfect
prelude to Zero History coming in September.