Now, with his most fascinating novel to date, Gibson looks into our very
near future, bringing it into sharp and darkly comic focus. Welcome to
NoCal and SoCal, 2005, the uneasy sister-states of Northern and Southern
California, in a nation and society still divided along seismic fault
lines of wealth and power...chasms seldom crossed except in fear,
exploitation, or violence. The millennium has come and gone, leaving in
its wake the ruins of our outworn modern era and the first chaotic
suggestions of a new paradigm. In Tokyo a new city is growing from the
rubble of Godzilla the Superquake. In San Francisco Mr. Yamazaki, a
Japanese anthropology student, investigates the deeper meaning of an
anarchic squatter community constructed around the disused Bay Bridge.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Berry Rydell just wants to make a living. Not
the easiest thing for an ex-cop from Tennessee to do - now that the
network has decided not to base that episode of Cops in Trouble on his
brief but all too eventful career with the Knoxville P.D. Rydell signs
on with IntenSecure Armed Response, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur
Hussar... It's only a matter of time before he runs into Chevette
Washington, a bicycle messenger who has just crashed the wrong
party...and who is about to pick the pocket of another kind of courier -
an employee of Costa Rica's Medellin-financed havens of illicit data.
When IntenSecure sends Rydell to San Francisco to drive for Lucius
Warbaby, a skip-tracer in the Virtual Reality maze of DatAmerica, Rydell
and Chevette find themselves on a journey into the ecstasy and dread
that mirror each other at the heart of the postmodern experience. A tour
de force of relentless suspense, daringinsight, and graphic intensity
Virtual Light is a provocative and unforgettable portrait of life on the
edge of the twenty-first century.
