Virtual Light: The Bridge Trilogy 01 by William Gibson

From The Week of March 07, 2010

Virtual Light: The Bridge Trilogy 01 by William Gibson

Neuromancer was the formative novel of my youth. It rocked me in ways I cannot describe. It changed forever my tastes for fiction even while setting an almost impossible bar for other works to achieve. For this, I'm eternally grateful to Mr. Gibson. As a consequence of Neuromancer's brilliance however, The Bridge Trilogy cannot hold up. There's greatness here, in all the important aspects of literature, but there's a kind of pointlessness to it all that detracts from the trilogy's power. Case had a hand in changing his world forever; can Berry claim the same? Let's find out.

Set on a near-future Earth dominated by celebrity, media and information technology, a bike courier, Chevette, comes into possession of a pair of glasses which prove to be extraordinarily important to a group of shadowy figures who'll do about anything to get their hands on them. One of the factions hires Berry Rydell, a discredited police officer turned security guard, to put his cop's nose to good use and find the glasses and their keeper before his competition get there first. The story weaves its way through a dystopian California divided into two distinct states, north and south. We linger longest on the Bridge, a kind of artificial community which has occupied the earthquake-crippled Bay Bridge, connecting Oakland with San Francisco. It's here that our story flourishes, an amazing, diverse community which receives the full measure of Mr. Gibson's wonderful imagination.

For a novel pre-dating the Internet -- it was originally published in 1993 --, Mr. Gibson was cuttingly prescient about our obsession with celebrity culture in a world where information is as ubiquitous as the media. So while some of the details haven't born out -- not that he ever claimed they would --, Mr. Gibson's cultural analysis is bang on. This allows Virtual Light to age far more gracefully than most science fiction. The setting and the characters shine, here, more than the plot does. Berry and Chevette are adorable in their sad, earnest, mismatchedness. And the greedy, self-interested agents pursuing them are three-dimensional portrayals of people who sold themselves to the system. A great start. (4/5 Stars)