Virtual Light

By: William Gibson

Narrated by: Jason Keller

NEW YORK TIMES bestseller • 2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California.

The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich—or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash. . . .

Praise for Virtual Light

“Both exhilarating and terrifying . . . Although considered the master of 'cyberpunk' science fiction, William Gibson is also one fine suspense writer.”—People

“A stunner . . . A terrifically stylish burst of kick-butt imagination.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Convincing . . . frightening . . . Virtual Light is written with a sense of craft, a sense of humor and a sense of the ultimate seriousness of the problems it explores.”—Chicago Tribune

“In the emerging pop culture of the information age, Gibson is the brightest star.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

Critic reviews

“Both exhilarating and terrifying . . . Although considered the master of 'cyberpunk' science fiction, William Gibson is also one fine suspense writer.”—People

“A stunner . . . A terrifically stylish burst of kick-butt imagination.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Convincing . . . frightening . . . Virtual Light is written with a sense of craft, a sense of humor and a sense of the ultimate seriousness of the problems it explores.”—Chicago Tribune

“In the emerging pop culture of the information age, Gibson is the brightest star.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

Missing Frank Muller

I love this first book of the bridge trilogy. It’s funny, exciting, well-written and well imagined.
I loved the original Frank Muller narration of this book and have been sad that a recording of this book has not been available on audible. Muller had a real feel for Gibson’s prose. And the characters as he read them were so much cooler than in this tepid narration.

Good book. Terrible narrator.

Even though the 21st century hasn’t turned out much like Gibson envisioned it, this is still a fun read. His speculative fiction has become our alternative history, and it’s actually entertaining to see where real life has spun off in totally different directions than any of us imagined in the 1990’s, when I first read this series. Too bad they didn’t get a better narrator—one who wouldn’t butcher Gibson’s prose with mispronunciations and terrible scansion. Almost ruined it for me.

It’s here, finally! I’ve been waiting for this title to show up in the catalog since I joined!

While I’m sure that almost everyone reading this is familiar with the work of William Gibson, but for those who are not, you are in for a real treat.

Virtual Light apparently grew out of a 1992 short story that Gibson wrote entitled “Skinner’s Room,” which I’ll have to find on its own. In that short story and later in the novels, a group of homeless people have taken over the ruins of the Bay Bridge and made it their own. This is the bridge that connects San Francisco and Oakland, California. The bridge is deemed unsafe and shuttered after it was finally wrecked by a massive earthquake. (It was actually badly damaged in 1989, costing billions of dollars to repair.) The other books in the series, Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), have been available on Audible for some time now. Idoru is one I’ve read before, and I think it might be one of Gibson’s best, so I’m really looking forward to the audiobook.

Gibson assigns specific dates to some past events of his future world, dates that are now in our past. The story itself is set in 2005, but it all still hangs together, feeling like a warning sign for future events we will likely have to face before long. As with many of Gibson’s stories, he explores the liminal space between a growing virtual world of information, with so-called expert systems (narrow AI) which underpin and increasingly automate the physical world in a very dependent way.

I think it is important to remember that it was Gibson who first coined the term “cyberspace,” a term we now take very much for granted as a reality, more than a decade before Virtual Light was written, in the short story “Burning Chrome” (1982), and then again in the novel Neuromancer (1984). A remarkable insight given that Gibson to this day still considers himself to be very technologically disinclined. He wrote those first stories on a mechanical typewriter after all, and I don’t think he did that to be ironic. It is only near the end of the story that our hero’s wander into a colorful world of rebellious hackers fighting the system across the net.

The characters are as always intricately drawn, with the same degree of poetic verisimilitude that fans of Gibson’s work have come to expect. Berry Rydell is a down-on-his-luck, failed-to-launch cop, who goes on to become a would-be security professional. Before long, his “go with the flow” haphazard employment choices put him in the path of a young Chevette Washington, an angry punk bicycle courier who finds herself on the run after she hits some nasty speed bumps, made out from her own very recent, and poor life decisions. The unlikely pair are thrust together and into a churn of events that neither fully understands, but arguably nobody else does either.

Some of the weirdo highlight characters include a drug-addled assassin, a pair of dirty Russian cops, an assortment of freelance fixers, and a reality television production just wacky enough that you can imagine it might some day steam on Amazon Prime. All of this is set against a backdrop of plots and schemes by the ultra-rich, who are - as always - taking shortcuts by employing technology they don’t really understand. All in an attempt to gain even more wealth and power over an already wrung-dry dystopian society. Soon we see that, like that broken bridge in the bay, everything is starting to fray and collapse in on itself, under the mounting weight of inequity and unintended consequences.

While most of the performance of the voice actor Jason Keller is very good, you might find that you have to push past the narrator’s voice used in a large part of the beginning of the story. In terms of the tone of the story here, the voice comes off like an excited sports announcer. Gibson is known for his long, unvarnished, sharply detailed descriptions, all laid out before the reader as is. I would like to have these parts directed in a more flat, matter-of-fact voice. The jaunty tone was distracting for me. I’m chalking it up to an oversight in direction, as overall Jason’s performance for the dialog delivery is very good, with careful attention to the Southern accents which don’t seem overstated. Nearly all the character voices are so well done. His Skinner voice paints a particularly vivid picture of the old homeless man’s jumbled mind and abrasive wisdom.

Glasses Tech

Science Fiction, futurism, cyber punk, William Gibson provides a dark future with the street use of technology not always as intended. It was a wonderful look into various overlapping strata in the society that developed with the division of north and south California.Loved it!!

interesting story marred by narrator

the narration felt like it was being read by an AI at times and didn't fit the mood of the book.