#bridge trilogy

[urbxntwilight]

Idoru by William Gibson, 1996 first edition cover

[electroniccatsaudiofriend]

[streetfindsitsownusesforthings]

"...the bridge. Things had accumulated there, around some armature of original purpose, until a point of crisis had been attained and a new program had emerged. But what was that program?” William Gibson, Virtual Light (1993)  

[fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia]

Review: Virtual Light (novel)

Author: William Gibson

Genre: cyberpunk, thriller

Year: 1993

Notes: First volume of the Bridge Trilogy. I’ve read the Italian translation by Delio Zinoni published by Mondadori (a very bad translation, sadly). Read this review in Italian here.

Berry Rydell is an ex-cop now private security agent who loses his job after a particular mistake that he makes. A friend finds him another job, and Rydell heads to San Francisco to work for a head hunter on a mission. Chevette Washington is a bycicle messenger living on the San Francisco bridge: after a powerful earthquake, the bridge was abandoned and occupied by people who, like her, live on the edge of society and have built an entire town on the bridge and its pillars. She shares a room with an old man named Skinner who saved her life many years ago. With her precious bike and her job, Chevette is satisfied with her life. But things change when she delivers a package at a fancy hotel and infiltrates a private party hosted by a very rich guy, just out of curiosity. There’s money, drugs, and a very annoying guy who keeps pestering her. So she steals something that protrudes from his jacket and leaves. It turns out the thing is a pair of VR special glasses, and a lot of people want them and are ready to kill for them, so Chevette is in trouble… eventually, her plot (and life) collides with Rydell’s.

Aaaand there goes the disappointment. Because with such a promising plot one imagines the glasses to contain super hot and valuable data. They… sort of do? But honestly, by reading it I thought “oh ok they were killing people just for this?” I can imagine wanting to retrieve it but I cannot fathom why killing and causing such chaos for it, and this is the novel’s weakest point. Killing for something everyone wants is an old plot device and I got nothing against it, but it has to be something really important. In Neuromancer Gibson gave us scary AIs and powerful megacorps, things too big to be understood and fought, things no one could dismiss the importance of and which were fundamental, plot-wise. But here’s the trouble with Virtual Light, the whole cyberpunk-ness is tuned down a lot, and the dialogues and descriptions get much more Raymond Chandler-ish. Maybe it just aged badly, but with the exception of a few scenes there was very little of that iconic cyberpunk universe many of us have read and love.

The saving grace of this novel is the setting, which is, I have to admit, interesting. A whole cult devoted to a sort of “patron saint” of HIV, a religion that sees God in tv screens and wants his followers to watch as many movies as possible, and the bridge city, living on the metaphorical and literal edge of everything, as observed by a japanese student who starts living with Skinner in order to understand that life and that city… yes, there’s much to work with, and even some side characters are worth being mentioned, like Sublett, Rydell’s colleague and friend who is allergic to everything, and Skinner himself, a man which looks straight out of some of Gibson’s best stories (like the ones in Burning Chrome).

To summarize, I could say that in Virtual Light we have a good writer (Gibson’s style is still good, after all) in a good setting… working with a plot that just isn’t as good as it’s supposed to be.

Vote: 7,5

[eduardkorhonen]

San Francisco - Oakland Bridge

[wakizashisteahouse]

All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) by William Gibson

All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) by William Gibson

Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. from the synopsis Let me begin with a caveat. I am a big fan of…

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[roc-thoughtblog]

Idoru Readthrough Part 3

Chapter 24-26, Pages 169-188

I like how it has to be stated every time the characters notice the driver side is different here. I've been keeping my eye out for quotes to save but the chapters have been too short and absorbing; I think the story is really starting to pick up. Also so far I've only been engaged to look out for character descriptions, which haven't happened.

Spoilers below.

Chapter 24: Hotel Di Short chapter, Gomi boy takes Chia and Masahiko to a love hotel by cab. It's raining the whole way. Gibson never seems to run out of ways to describe pouring rain, rain slicked streets, rain down windows, neon lights in rain. I was wondering how he does it but maybe I just answered my own question through variety.

Gomi boy arranges a room and leaves. Masahiko starts setting up shop while Chia explores the hotel room. Chia's bag gets a weird reaction from the overengineered love hotel bed, iunno if that's plot relevant or just a weird love hotel thing because a bag got dumped on it.

I enjoyed the little attentions to detail, like the "starched white lace fixed to all the headrests" of the cab.

A few days ago a friend was just telling me about the hilarious hyperfixation Cyberpunk 2077 seemed to have with sex and the sex industry, and here we are Chia exploring the bathroom of a sex hotel and awkwardly finding all sorts of things she doesn't recognise. Honestly this kind of setting written from the perspective of a teenage girl can get... all kinds of uncomfortable with certain kinds of authors who have never been teenage girls, so I was a bit apprenhensive. Having said that, Gibson seems to avoid this sort of thing.

Kind of, I was just having that thought when Chia has to urinate, which I guess people do and it was the reason she went to the bathroom, but it's still slightly awkward to read. It's not weird weird, like it's written entirely matter of factly and I think it's just to show that she does not know how to process/doesn't want to touch the overengineered foreign love hotel toilet... but it's still awkward for me to read.

Chapter 25: The Idoru Rei Toei gets the proper Gibson description treatment immediately, before Rez does. Not sure how she's manifesting in this physical space. Her eyes seem to evoke some sort deep spiritual human awakening on Laney & evidently Blackwell, probably Arleigh too. He connects it as nodal in nature, his specialty.

Oooh mid-chapter divider.

Brief flashback; Laney seemed to be a special experiment. Someone at a place that took him in identified his nodal vision as special, akin to the echolocation, that helps him navigate the data in ways most cannot. This is probably to explain why Rei has a bigger effect on him than she does on anyone else at the table, who seem mostly fine.

Rei's face seems to invoke a primal overload of information, because that is what she is. Tip of an iceberg the size of humanity's collective thought. What an awkward dinner for Laney, confused, overwhelmed and trying not to stare because staring makes the overloading worse. I really love how this dinner is conveyed, how utterly lost Laney is, trying to grasp a reality he is completely detached from because every glimpse he catches of the infinite depth of human media sends him into tailspin. A full party is at the table here and he's getting absolutely none of it, and I'm not bothered that I'm not either. I wonder how it would be conveyed through film? I can think of lots of bad, cliched ways to do it but I'd love to see what a master could do.

Oh shit Yamazaki is telling Laney to try the fanclubs for metadata. Connections appearing.

Oh dang, Laney's vision of humanity is actually just directly related to the Idol's last music video, which may or may not take the global human spirituality factor out of it all. Makes sense, kinda funny seeing Laney drop a chopstick over it. Poor dude is completely lost.

Chapter 26: Hak Nam Chia and Masahiko, sitting on the floor because the love hotel bed weirds them both out. I think among other things the lack of wireless connection and smartphones is the biggest miss of this vision of the future (assuming a comparison to present day, which is technically unfair I suppose). Then again, Chia'd be in so much more trouble if she had devices that could be tracked wirelessly or by GPS.

Chia's wired into Masahiko's VR room, that has to be accessed through an elaborate traversal path. Aside; Chia watches an adblocker literally devour an ad for KKK merch. Another aside; Masahiko's part of a digital Walled City of Kowloon, but I didn't mention it before because it didn't seem directly plot relevant and still hasn't. Though, it appears to have been one of the things Laney saw in Rei Toei's face. Chia ports into her own VR space through Masahiko's space through the love hotel's VPN that reroutes through Helsinki.

Chia can't get to any of her friends, and her friend Zona's private VR space is creepily lifeless. I'm not too sure how that works because I imagine if anything happened to Zona her VR wildlife shouldn't be affected/also not sure why anyone who might be targetting Zona would go out of their way to eradicate VR wildlife. Chalk it down to rule of cool.

Gibson also never seems to run out of poetic ways to describe different tones of sky, though they're pretty brief.

Chia tries to access her personal Venice space but that place is also weirdly lifeless and off, so she takes her headset off and.

Oh shit Maryalice is here somehow, in real life. Holy shit she's got a gun. Holy shit she just pulled the trigger-

- to light her cigarette. Wow. Pretty badass character moment and also it got me good for a second there. Thought Masahiko just got eliminated. Well played. I really love it.

This is also the sort of thing I sadly just can't save as a quote because the context of the quote is what makes it hit, and man does it hit. Also makes for one of the better feeling chapter end/cliffhangers because I guess the fakeout gives the chapter some feeling of resolution even despite not knowing how Maryalice got there in the first place.

[roc-thoughtblog]

Idoru Readthrough - Part 2

Chapters 22 & 23, Pages 153-169

Spoiler thoughts below.

Chapter 22: Gomi Boy Chia meets Gomi boy, who explains the situation. The Russian government really IS the mafia! And is out to get her. The cashcard is still being traced, so Chia can't use it to arrange her trip home. Poor lass. Also, Masahiko can't access the net without being tracked now either.

However, Gomi boy DOES know of a special place where neither of them, or the cashcard, can be tracked.

It's a love hotel.

I love it. It's one of those small twist situations that feel ridiculous or contrived but also makes so much sense in an obvious way that makes me kick myself like damn. They got me.

Of course now that we get something cool we have to cliffhanger the chapter to switch perspective again yaaaaaaaay. :(

Chapter 23: Here at the Western World Back to Laney, who's being taken to "The Western World" to finally meet Rez. This chapter is mostly just Laney being absorbed in his own mind while Arleigh McCrae talks about the setting through describing "The Western World".

I don't particularly know anything about principles of exposition or on how to write travelling/transitory scenes but it works really well. The details Arleigh seems to exposit seem weird or extranneous to the story but they intersperse Laney's introspection in a nicely paced, complementary way such that neither seems overexposed or gets boring.

As an aside, still being fed strange tidbits about the world. As said, Russia is governed by the Mafia confirmed (and also plot relevant), occupied Paris is mentioned but I have no idea if that's referring to WWII or if Paris is currently occupied in setting. Tokyo was levelled by an earthquake came up again but then again it's Japan so what else is new.

Also, "The Western World" is an post-disaster "unlicensed" club in a declared-structurally-unsound building. It's kinda messed up. The stairs leading up it are literally solidified piss and the bar has a sherman tank in the middle of it, both of which have to explained/exposited by Arleigh. This might be weird, but it works, because:

We finally meet Rez. But we don't meet him. Laney's been lost in his head the whole chapter and is also completely wigged out by the tank and the urine stairs and the elaborate backstory behind the club, he's completely overwhelmed and has to be snapped to reality to only to barely properly register seeing or speaking to the real Rez the person. We've been put entirely in his shoes the whole chapter, so it works on us too. It's awesome.

And because of that, Rez gets introduced in such a completely sparingly way that he stands out super hard. Gomi boy got a paragraph of visual description. Blackwell, Arleigh, Yamazaki, they're still having their appearances further characterised and fleshed out through action or Laney's observation. Rez has been described before, but only in very general, circumspect terms, absolutely nothing compared the colourful specifity of everyone else. Just a figure in passing, a celebrity seen on a screen. Now that he's finally appeared properly, the only thing Rez gets a single, laser-sharp line about his long green eyes, because Laney is still trying to assemble the image with the man on top of already being mentally overloaded. It's so good.

And not only that, but the second last line: Rei Toei, the virtual idol, is here! Finally! To be CLIFFHANGERED AGAIN before she even appears. I actually think the structure of the pacing is really starting to frustrate me a little, but everything else is Nice.