DP Tool Club 8/CDASC08.ISO/VRAC/BOOK0090.ZIP/BOOK0090.TXT

Text File | 1993-08-23 | 10KB | 153 lines

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From: [e-mail] ([e-mail])
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: REVIEW: Virtual Light
Date: 23 Aug 1993 00:58:38 -0400
Organization: General Videotex Corporation
Lines: 140
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Summary: h< The New Gibson: A Disappointment >h
Keywords: gibson, cyberpunk, virtual light


William Gibson, Virtual Light, Bantam, 1993.
Reviewed by Bluejack

It is a big day for cyberpunks everywhere. A big day, but not
necessarily a happy day. William Gibson's new novel Virtual Light has just
hit the stores, and it thoroughly disappoints. It may be true: Gibson has
lost his edge.
In his first books, William Gibson founded 'cyberpunk,' a new style of
science fiction that blends cutting edge technology with a bleak social and
ecological future. Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa
Overdrive, took technologies currently under development to their probable
conclusions and set them in a world in which national boundaries have been
replaced by corporate boundaries, and political structures have become
vestigial features of the landscape of information. In the cyberspace,
cyberpunk world, human flesh and human technology merge, and the desparate
struggle for survival and success take place in the intersection of a dying
planet and a blossoming computer-generated artificial world. This vision
caught the imagination of a new generation of science fiction readers not
just because of the range and maturity of his ideas, but also because of
the sheer beauty of Gibson's writing.
Following the success of this trilogy, cyberpunk took on a life of its
own, peopled by the creations of uncountable imitators, fueled by both the
alternative and mainstream media. It has determined the direction of new
technologies from computer networks to multimedia; it has sparked thousands
of real-world applications of virtual reality technology. So, when William
Gibson releases a novel, it is cause for great stirring in the world of
science fiction.
Think of him as a prophet. He has a personal mythology: when he first
began to write Neuromancer, he didn't know a bit from a byte, a modem from
a motherboard. He did a little reading in the popular science press, and
combined it with an incisive vision of the future of urban America. He
introduced characters that science fiction wasn't used to: small time
crooks, underdogs, and pathetic heros, most blissfully and adolescently
unaware of the dangers they were putting themselves into. He plunked it out
on a manual typerwriter.
Gibson claims he wasn't trying to do anything original. He saw himself
in the tradition of Robert Silverberg, Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, or
Stanislaw Lem: writing science fiction that was about society, about real
people, and about the world we live in now. But he was also writing
exciting sci-fi in a voice no one had heard before -- the gravel throated
drawl of the downtrodden.
But recently there has been reason to doubt. Gibson's last work, The
Difference Engine, co-authored by Bruce Sterling, was a great
disappointment to many fans. It had neither the depth, the intricacy, nor
the style of his previous works. One could blame it on Sterling, who, while
a heavyweight in the cyberpunk mythos, just doesn't have the talent that
Gibson has. Thus it was with a sense of great anticipation and dark
foreboding that we awaited Virtual Light.
The story: Berry Rydell has failed as a cop & now he has blown his job
with IntenSecure, world's largest private security corporation. Rydell, it
seems, can take his work a little too seriously, throwing everything he has
at a situation that calls for delicacy. It's not his fault that he steers
his Hotspur Hussar (affectionately nicknamed Gunhead) through the high-
power security gate and into the living room of a wealthy couple, only to
find the wife cavorting with a gardener: some hacker got into his onboard
computer and sent a kidnap in progress warning, children in mortal danger.
Nonetheless, IntenSecure couldn't keep him on. They did, however, place him
with a freelancer up in San Fran who was on a particularly important
mission for the corporation.
Meanwhile Chevette, a quick but naive young bike courier in San
Francisco finds herself in a bit of trouble. It was the last run of her day
and she found herself in the midst of a very high class party. Not a nice
party. When an obnoxious, creepy man, who also turns out to be a courier of
a different sort, feels her up, Chevette retaliates by quietly relieving
him of his parcel. Only later, when all the weight of the Columbian
information cartel comes down on her courier company does she realize quite
how big a mistake she has made.
Virtual Light finds a new setting: San Francisco in a near future that
has suffered a major earthquake. It is the same world of urban decay and
environmental degradation that Gibson's other work has been in, less of
it, the picture is less detailed, the presence of a massive tangle
of corporate interests and intrigues is missing. There are, however, some
beautiful ideas, most notably the Bridge:
"Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion
of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with
decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi
bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of
commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had
once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks
of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its
unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy."
This is the Bay Bridge, damaged beyond repair in the great quake, but
still sturdy enough to be haphazardly constructed upon by the outcasts of
an unforgiving world of all-powerful corporations. These are the outcasts
that Gibson brought into science fiction, this is vision that gave birth to
cyberpunk.
So what's wrong with it? It's a good story, told with more style than
most of his imitators. The language is still hip, the technology is still
speculative, the characters are still real.
Problem is, it's the same characters but with different names. It's
the same misfits and underdogs trying tit pros, the same small
time folks that have wandered through all Gibson's other novels. They are
losing their grit, they have be
Problem is, it's the same hip language, the same too-cool style. Now
that everyone is talking it, there's not much to lift Gibson above the
crowd of his followers except the historical point that he did it first.
It's nothing new, now.
Problem is, he's lost his ability to articulate speculative technology
in a convincing way -- the only new technologies in Virtual Light are a
collection of ambiguous quasi-organic sciences referred to variously as
German Nanotech, nanospore, and nanomech. But the workings are opaque and
uninspiring; it ends up a simple fantasy of impossible, magical technology.
But most of em is that Gibson's vision has grown stale.
One gets the feeling that somewhere in his success Gibson has lost touch
with the outcasts of our own world and has gone looking for inspiration not
in the ghettos, not among the burnt-out factories or the junkyards or the
deserted rail yards, but rather in the glossy pages of Mondo 2000 or in the
books of his own followers. In Neuromancer one felt that Gibson knew what
it was like to hungry for a couple of weeks, that he himself had tasted
this desperate craving for victory that his characters sought. The story of
failure, despair, and improbable victory became real. In Virtual Light one
feels that Gibson has spent to much time playtesting Virtual Reality
headgear and eating at good restaurants.
Indeed, in comparison with works by some of his recent imitators,
Virtual Light seems very light indeed. Of particular note are twadditions
to the Cyberpunk canon. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has neither
the smooth voice nor the tight plot of any Gibson novel, but it has a cast
of fun characters and a love of new technological ideas that is missing in
Gibson's new work. Most interesting of all, published in early '92, Snow
Crash also features a cute young woman who is a skateboard courier. Of more
serious intent and of more challenging substance is Norman Spinrad's Little
Heroes. Spinrad, a longtime sci-fi author with lifelong subversive intent
uses the cyberpunk milieu to explore the possibility of music/software as a
drug with which to incite revolution. Has Gibson been reading this stuff?
Both books do have Gibson-quotes on the cover...
With as much acclaim as he has received in recent years, perhaps it is
inevitable that his work should suffer. There are few instances where an
author's work was improved by the unabashed admiration and imitation of
others. No longer a prophet in the wilderness transcribing the visions of
his genius, Gibson is a celebrated patriarch. He is part of the phenomenon.
He is linked into Internet, he makes regular appearances in Mondo 2000
surrounded by the flattering voices of the faithful, he is an idol to a
whole new generation of would-be hackers. The ancients were known for
exiling or destroying their prophets, perhaps we eliminate ours through
process of assimilation.

-- Bluejack
P{hiladelphia, 1993