The Peak Simon Fraser University's Student Newspaper since 1965 SimonFraserUniversity|Burnaby,BritishColumbia,CanadaV5A1S6 e-mail:the-peak\@sfu.ca|phone:(604)291-3597fax:(604)291-3786 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- --VolumeLXXXVIIssue:11--March21,1994----ArtsandCulture ***************************************************************************** Book Review: Virtual Light by William Gibson (Seal Books) By Dan Dick *****************************************************************************William Gibson, author of the ground breaking science fiction novel Neuromancer as well as the best selling novels, Count Zero, Mono Lisa Overdrive, and the critically acclaimed anthology Burning Chrome, has published his first novel in five years. Virtual Light marks Gibson's return to the North American bestseller lists and firmly re-establishes him among the elite of science fiction's literary canon.
Gibson, a local Vancouver author, was instumental in helping to popularize the literary movement known as "cyberpunk" over ten years ago. Cyberpunk fiction introduced people to a near future of street-wise punks and computer hackers who operated in a high-tech low-life cyberculture.
While creating the Neuromancer sprawl trilogy, Gibson continued to develop as a writer and built upon his earlier ideas.
In his new novel, published by Seal Books, Gibson gives his readers a novel that is more identifiable to its audience than his sprawl trilogy and makes a clean departure from the hard-core cyberpunk story. Virtual Light is a less romanticized vision of the future and its inhabitants. The characters are not high-tech hackers or technologically altered human beings; they are every day people pitted against and manipulated by the various Powers That Be.
The novel is set in NoCal and SoCal, the sister nations of Northern and Southern California, in the year 2005. It is a smaller scale action story that has an ex-cop named Berry Rydell and a San Francisco bike courier named Chevette Washington teaming up to fight and outsmart the bad guys.
The plot of the story is set in motion when Chevette steals a pair of glasses at a party -- glasses that turn out to be a self-contained virtual reality system packed with some very interesting and volatile information. Problems arise soon after when the various antagonists in the story discover that Chevette has the glasses. Eventually, this leads to the meeting of Chevette and Berry and the unfolding of the rest of the story.
With his literary sensibility on overdrive, Gibson delivers a novel that is, like his previous novels, more about our present than about any fictitious future. The novel is full of thought-provoking social commentary that is brilliantly woven into the plot so that even the smallest morsel of throw- away description is full of powerful meaning. Perhaps what is so special about this subtle commentary on contemporary society is that it is achieved while enhancing, instead of disrupting, a purely fluid narrative.
(Ed. Note: When told, during an interview on KPFA, a
Bay Area listener-sponsored radio station, that _Virtual
Light_ had been uploaded to the Internet, Gibson replied,
to any concerns that his copyright was being violated and
he was losing royalties, by saying: "I am not a member of
the Cyber Literary Police.")