★★★☆☆ Too bleak for me

Virtual Light

William Gibson

Virtual Light is the first novel in William Gibson's Bridge trilogy, published from 1993-1999 after his huge success with the Cyberspace trilogy (1984-1988). The Bridge trilogy is not, in my opinion, as good as the Cyberspace trilogy.

The structure of Virtual Light is similar to that of the Cyberspace novels -- each chapter is told from the point of view of one character, and the POV character rotates through four principle characters. These are Chevette Washington, a young woman (teenager?), Berry Rydell, a former policeman turned security guard, a data courier, whose name I am not sure we ever learn, and Yamazaki, a Japanese sociology grad student studying San Francisco culture. Most of the action takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's a postapocalyptic world. The nature of the apocalypse is not spelled out, although several elements of it are sketchily described. The USA no longer really exists as such -- it, like most of the world's large nations, has broken down into smaller countries.

It's a world in which everyone is hanging on by a thread, except for those who aren't. Much of the action takes place on the Bridge, after which the series is presumably named. There are several bridges around and across the Bay. The longest is the Bay Bridge that connects the cities of San Francisco and Oakland. Although it is never named in the novel, this is the one that became the Bridge. It appears to be largely intact, though no longer useful as a road. Instead, it has become the home of a feral culture of hundreds or thousands of people who manage to eke out a life there. Chevette is one of these.

The Cyberspace trilogy was bleak, but Virtual Light is bleaker. Also, there are no interesting new inventions, like Cyberspace. In fact, Virtual Light had the misfortune of being overtaken by reality. The telephones of Virtual Light are early 1990s flip phones -- Gibson did not envision anything like the modern cell-phone culture and social media. I read Idoru, the second book, years ago, and the only thing I remember is that I didn't enjoy it much. I will not be rereading it, nor the third book, All Tomorrow's Parties.

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