Virtual Light

Gibson, William. Virtual Light. New York: Spectra-Bantam, 1993. For translations and reprints, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of June 2022, here.[1]

Cyberpunk novel, but gentler than Gibson's Neuromancer series, set in a near-future California, mostly in greater Los Angeles and San Francisco. Plot revolves around the murder of a courier from whom a major character has casually stolen a pair of what she thinks are sunglasses. The stolen article — a kind of high-tech Maltese Falcon — turns out to be "Virtual Light" glasses loaded with highly confidential data about plans to make over San Francisco via nanotechnology (see 129-31 for VL, ch. 15; also see Acknowledgments). Note typically Gibsonian high-tech texture, and the importance of computer hackers at key points in the plot. Rev. Gwyneth Jones, Foundation #60 (Spring 1994): 104-08.

Dominick Grace offers an important discussion of this novel in "From Videodrome to Virtual Light: David Cronenberg and William Gibson."

The plot of the novel [...] depends on the deceptive power of technological media, though computers figure more prominently than television. [Berry] Rydell's[2] troubles in the novel result from the intrusion into his reality of technological manipulations sufficiently convincing to supplant reality [...]. [***]

["The Republic of Desire:] As hackers, the Republic of Desire represents the ancestors of Gibson's computer cowboys in the later cyberpunk novels (Virtual Light is set in the same future world as Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy, but several decades earlier [...]). [...] The Republic represents a radically different model of the human/machine interface than that promulgated by corporate media. The television storm manifestation represents electronic media as fluid and complex, as sexless, and as impossibly multiple. The transformation of human into televisual machine is metaphoric only, a virtual manifestation rather than a literal one, but even as a metaphor the model represented suggests a [...] radical and radically liberated view of human potential [...]. At least the Republic of Desire model of interface with technological transformation involves an active and personal participation, whereas organization such as the Fallonite cult, or, more significantly, IntenSecure demand a passive acceptance of whatever "truth" best serves the interests of the power elite. (pp. 352-53)

(RDE, 10/11/93; 29/10/94; 26/12/01; 12May19, 22Jun22)