Runo Knows...Virtual Light
I decided to go ahead and do them separately though I did finish Idoru last night - and then I finished The Complete Hammer's Slammers Vol. 2 today. I'll get to those.
Virtual Light is the first in the trilogy of books by William Gibson that includes it, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties. Basically, much like the Neuromancer trilogy, it follows a variety of characters through various interactions, most of them having something to do with DatAmerica - a large corporation that basically seems to own a good bit of the Internet-like information sphere that permeates these books - and the rise of nanotechnology and AI.
Virtual Light, specifically, concerns a pair of Virtual Light goggles - basically, they interface directly with your optic nerves. One of the two main characters, a bicycle messenger in San Francisco named Chevette Washington, stole them from a courier at a party. Chevette isn't certain what they are, and takes them back with her to her small room in the shantytown that has formed on the Golden Gate Bridge, where she lives with an old man named Skinner.
Meanwhile, Barry Rydell, a former cop from Knoxville turned former private security with IntenSecure - a division of DatAmerica - is working freelance with a skip tracer named Lucius Warbaby to recover the goggles. When they end up working with some Russian SFPD Homicide cops that don't seem to be on the level, Rydell decides instead to help Chevette.
Meanwhile, again, there are the other subplots - a hit man named Loveless who is after them, a grad student from Japan named Yamazaki who is studying the bridge, the "what happened" to people such as Chevette's coworkers and one of Rydell's only friends, a man named Sublett who is allergic to everything and part of a cult that believes God is on TV.
Virtual Light shows its age much more than Idoru; it's not quite as bad as Sterling's Islands in the Net, as it at least seems to acknowledge the existence of e-mail, but still people rely on faxes much more than they do - well, now. The "near future" isn't laid out in any firm kind of way, it's hard to even tell what year it is, which does help keep it a bit more ageless than saying specifically this or that or the other, though some of the events are a bit dated now while others - I'm thinking of a lot of the Gulf War references, specifically - have aged better mostly thanks to the fact that there's been another one.
One of the little things about Gibson's writing that I noticed more so in this book than previous ones - not saying they weren't there, per se, but just that I noticed them more - were the short, irrelevant but flavor-creating conversations. One specific example for instance is an approximately three line conversation between Skinner and Yamazaki, where Skinner tells Yamazaki (or Scooter, as he calls him) to put some Three-in-One oil on a leather gasket in a lamp. There's no real need for the lines, but it helps create the atmosphere.
The corporate naming of things, on the other hand, is less-so in this one than in Neuromancer or its sequels/cohorts. In those books, a computer was never really a computer - it was a Cray, or a Braun, or whatever. Everything went by its "real" name, not a generic name. In Virtual Light, that's toned down a good bit. Sure, there will be a bit of exposition about who made "Gunhead", the armored security vehicle that Rydell and Sublett were driving when the event that caused Rydell to be fired happened, but it's not as forced upon the reader.
The overall relevance of these books, though, perhaps just doesn't reach the level of the previous trilogy for one big reason - the Neuromancer trilogy of books really helped spawn an entire submovement of science fiction, and the repercussions of cyberpunk as well as the stylings and themes still resonate throughout sci-fi literature today. Virtual Light and its sequels don't quite have that same kind of resonance or even, perhaps, lasting appeal, but that doesn't make them bad books - just, well, not as good as the quite powerful introductory works of Gibson that a lot of people may've been exposed to previously.
Next one in the series: Idoru, and I'll try to get to that one tomorrow.
Virtual Light is the first in the trilogy of books by William Gibson that includes it, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties. Basically, much like the Neuromancer trilogy, it follows a variety of characters through various interactions, most of them having something to do with DatAmerica - a large corporation that basically seems to own a good bit of the Internet-like information sphere that permeates these books - and the rise of nanotechnology and AI.
Virtual Light, specifically, concerns a pair of Virtual Light goggles - basically, they interface directly with your optic nerves. One of the two main characters, a bicycle messenger in San Francisco named Chevette Washington, stole them from a courier at a party. Chevette isn't certain what they are, and takes them back with her to her small room in the shantytown that has formed on the Golden Gate Bridge, where she lives with an old man named Skinner.
Meanwhile, Barry Rydell, a former cop from Knoxville turned former private security with IntenSecure - a division of DatAmerica - is working freelance with a skip tracer named Lucius Warbaby to recover the goggles. When they end up working with some Russian SFPD Homicide cops that don't seem to be on the level, Rydell decides instead to help Chevette.
Meanwhile, again, there are the other subplots - a hit man named Loveless who is after them, a grad student from Japan named Yamazaki who is studying the bridge, the "what happened" to people such as Chevette's coworkers and one of Rydell's only friends, a man named Sublett who is allergic to everything and part of a cult that believes God is on TV.
Virtual Light shows its age much more than Idoru; it's not quite as bad as Sterling's Islands in the Net, as it at least seems to acknowledge the existence of e-mail, but still people rely on faxes much more than they do - well, now. The "near future" isn't laid out in any firm kind of way, it's hard to even tell what year it is, which does help keep it a bit more ageless than saying specifically this or that or the other, though some of the events are a bit dated now while others - I'm thinking of a lot of the Gulf War references, specifically - have aged better mostly thanks to the fact that there's been another one.
One of the little things about Gibson's writing that I noticed more so in this book than previous ones - not saying they weren't there, per se, but just that I noticed them more - were the short, irrelevant but flavor-creating conversations. One specific example for instance is an approximately three line conversation between Skinner and Yamazaki, where Skinner tells Yamazaki (or Scooter, as he calls him) to put some Three-in-One oil on a leather gasket in a lamp. There's no real need for the lines, but it helps create the atmosphere.
The corporate naming of things, on the other hand, is less-so in this one than in Neuromancer or its sequels/cohorts. In those books, a computer was never really a computer - it was a Cray, or a Braun, or whatever. Everything went by its "real" name, not a generic name. In Virtual Light, that's toned down a good bit. Sure, there will be a bit of exposition about who made "Gunhead", the armored security vehicle that Rydell and Sublett were driving when the event that caused Rydell to be fired happened, but it's not as forced upon the reader.
The overall relevance of these books, though, perhaps just doesn't reach the level of the previous trilogy for one big reason - the Neuromancer trilogy of books really helped spawn an entire submovement of science fiction, and the repercussions of cyberpunk as well as the stylings and themes still resonate throughout sci-fi literature today. Virtual Light and its sequels don't quite have that same kind of resonance or even, perhaps, lasting appeal, but that doesn't make them bad books - just, well, not as good as the quite powerful introductory works of Gibson that a lot of people may've been exposed to previously.
Next one in the series: Idoru, and I'll try to get to that one tomorrow.