I'm re-reading the early Gibson because I remember liking them and I can't keep the books straight. Virtual Light stands as high-quality, maybe one of his more underrated titles, at least to me, upon a second reading, because except for a somewhat abrupt ending, the novel is excellent. The book's true star is the bridge, and if Gibson ever releases a "greatest hits" of passages from his work, his initial description of the bridge deserves a place of honor. You can see him extending Ballard's inf...

If Haruki Murakami and Philip K Dick had ever written a book together this would have been it (they didn't have no baby or anything though). To me it felt like Philip's story but in the voice of Murakami. My first William Gibson novel and I've enjoyed it, he has created an interesting future, things are only slightly more advanced than they are now which makes it easier to get into. There are a fair number of characters, all having little bit parts, I only really had an issue with one of then, Y...

Probably the least engaging book of Gibson I have read so far, this one is a very competent story with great storytelling that somehow fails to deliver on the plot-plot. I mean, it was fun and fast paced and interesting and an interpretation of our social future, and it had lots of interesting background choices of historical events and crazy urban tribes and religions created for the universe, along with Gibson's trademark shifting POVs and archetypal characters. It was good, it was fun, it was...

Not Gibson's best work, but still thoughtful. The whole cyberpunk genre is a valuable exploration of ideas about our near future. A future within reach of many who are alive today.

Is there a plot, characters, a "story" here? Sure, I guess so. But it all seems like window dressing to the dystopian "have nots" sticking it to the "haves" and mega corporations in near future "experience". Slightly more comprehensible than Gibson's earlier work, with occasional attempts at humor, but still, if this were a painting people would call it a mood piece. Some people would get it, most would not, though many would pretend to.

Having read about 70% of Gibson's work, I'd have to say, this is one of my favorites.Tight plot. Rapid movement and action. Dystopian, but not too depressingly so (sort of). Well done book, looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

Last week Kevin Mitnick was on The Colbert Report to promote his new book, Ghost in the Wires and talk about hacking. For those of us who grew up with the Web as a fact of life and absorbed "hacker culture" through Hollywood, Mitnick's experiences seem somewhat alien. Hacking started long before the Web, of course, and even today hacking is nothing like what one sees on the movies. However, it's just in this decade that we, as a society, are beginning to understand and react to the effects o...

Was rather disappointed by this one, and I'm starting to get the feeling that Gibson's been writing the same book over and over. While the technology mattered in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Virtual Light seemed more like a on-the-run-from-bad-guys thriller set in a vagueishly sci-fi setting. The tech that was stolen could have just as well been a candy bar. I wanted to find out more about the plan on the tech (to rebuild San Fran after an earthquake), the Bay Bridge community, and all the other int...

The last time I read this book was in the mid-90s. It came out in 1993, nine years after Gibson's Neuromancer, the novel that coined the phrase "cyberspace" and posited a world where we'd all be interconnected through an information network. He was wrong about the virtual reality stuff, but right about almost everything else. If Neuromancer was somewhat predictive of the future, Virtual Light reads like someone had gone to the future of 2005 and sent a postcard back to us. Reading it now and rea...

I felt like Gibson created a cool world for the story to take place in, but then just never wrote the story. A messenger nabs some VR glasses and gets the help of some ex-cop blah... who cares? He just never got me to care about the characters or their conflicts.I wanted to hear more about the dystopian California-states and the fancy VR itself, but then all Gibson wanted to talk about Berry and Chevette.3 stars purely because of the world Gibson dreamed up, but if you're looking for a good stor...

Read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson instead.

Okay, here's the thing: this book is FUN. Essentially you have a good cop accidentally getting railroaded, a good poor person who makes one mistake and pays the price, and then some evil corporation stuff and then it's just a fun little chase. Light, slight, well-written and fun. You get to hear about the near future Gibson imagined, which is interesting, you get to see some really interesting main protagonists, who are more fully fleshed out and intriguing than usually happens with these things...

PreromancerThis 1993 novel isn't so much set in the cyberspace of Gibson's “Neuromancer", as in the world of an imagined 2005/2006 (the exact date doesn't seem to be mentioned in the text itself, and there's a conflict in the extrinsic evidence), after some event (perhaps an earthquake) has destroyed much of San Francisco, and California has been split into two states, NoCal and SoCal.The technology isn't as advanced as the digital matrix in “Neuromancer", which was apparently set in the 203...

Great sociological science fiction with a cool vibe and, in my opinion, a vast improvement over Gibson's previous Sprawl trilogy. Some scary observations on 90's culture and crackling prose with a cool kind of dialogue for Gibson's characters. A brilliant piece of cyberpunk literature.

William Gibson begins his Bridge trilogy with this 1993 publication that was nominated for both the Hugo and the Locus awards.In the air of great protagonist names won hands down by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 cyberpunkapalooza Snow Crash with Hiro Protagonist, Gibson introduces us to Chevette Washington, a messenger living on the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland who gets caught up in corporate espionage surrounding some stolen glasses.But these are not just any glasses, they produce...

In Virtual Light, William Gibson dials down the cyberpunk motifs nearly to zero and what's left is a noirish cat and mouse chase. Gibson's novels often feature individuals caught up in grand, mostly offscreen machinations. This time they were too offscreen for my taste, or perhaps the characters weren't interesting enough for me. I would have liked to see more of the Bridge community. All in all, I didn't love it, sorry.

Just like "Burning Chrome" and the Sprawl Trilogy, this first entry into the Bridge Trilogy that Wm. Gibson wrote throughout the 1990's is a very different reading experience than I expected."Virtual Light" is an easier read than any of those, taking place in a near future dystopia with few fantastic elements. The plot is also less convoluted despite Gibson as usual insisting on using as little exposition as possible, meaning that blink-and-you'll-miss-it details often turn out to be major plot

Full review to follow...Briefly: This was a reread after a gap of I don't remember how many years. I remember enjoying it the first time. I'd given it 4 stars, from memory. I've upped my rating to the full five stars now. I think this might be Gibson's best work; even better than Neuromancer, which I love. But I need to reread the next two books in the Bridge Trilogy to be sure: Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties.

Great read, but more like an action thriller than the cyberpunk Matrixy stuff I like. As always, Gibson pleased with his unique rhythmic-technical, beat-poet style. I liked the characters. Some of the religious overtones reminded me of P.K. Dick, particularly the world of Palmer Eldritch. Anyways, still a joy to read this man.

Reading something like this after something like Snow Crash can only really leave you feeling one thing. There's no real comparison. This is basically Snow Crash Lite.William Gibson wrote an occasionally entertaining novel of an interesting possible future with some very good observations about humanity BUT it's characters and story structure are so similar to Neal Stephenson's masterpiece of the genre that you can't help but compare. Virtual Light will always lose, not least because Berry Rydel...