VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (24)
By:
September 26, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
VIRTUAL LIGHT | WILLIAM GIBSON | 1993
What I remembered was the Bridge. The colonized, DIY makerspace Bay Bridge in San Francisco, cut off from its connections and morphing into a cobbled-together city within a city of dropouts, Burning Man types, bike messengers, and aging hippies, in some near-future dystopia where The Big One had happened but it was still the ’90s. People lived there like an updated medieval London, with cardboard and scraps and pirated electricity and duct tape, and the outsider’s code of “we’re all independent together.”
I decided to re-read Virtual Light for this series because, although of course I had devoured all of Gibson’s work in the ’90s, and indeed, all cyberpunk that I could get my eyes on, I wanted to revisit certain key scenes that I thought were set there, but could also have been in Mona Lisa Overdrive, or Neuromancer, or someewhere else entirely. Memory nodes glow, but recall slips sideways, with the uneasy interplay of the discrete and the decaying that is, appropriately, a Gibson hallmark.
And what happened is that rather than retrieving some details about the Bridge, a major, albeit non-sentient, character in this, as well as Gibson’s other Bridge Trilogy novels, what was retrieved was an overwhelming memory of the future, the future of the ’90s, in San Francisco, in artist and edge-dweller networks, in cyberspace. The cyberpunk vision seemed so real back then when the web was just getting going, with its possibility spaces and its frictionless digital interfaces skewered and repurposed by grungy, physical tethers, and the sensation that everything was moving fast, so fast. You open the book and you’re jumping on a moving train, with slang and situations spinning out of control from the minute you’re in, and you just have to go with it, go along with it, and as you go along you speed up too. Form mirrors function as Gibson’s collision of the digital and the analog presents an almost-tangible “next year.” Or next decade. Or at any rate, soon. So soon.
And that future… did not happen. Mostly, they don’t; other ones do. I haven’t thought about that future in some time, there were other things to attend to, I left San Francisco, the ’90s faded to the usual set of signifiers decades leave in their wake. But virtual light looks strange through a sepia lens; feels pinned, labeled, heavy. “Is this thing on?”
To reread Virtual Light from the vantage point of now was not to vicariously inhabit the Bridge, as I had expected, but to see the glowing outlines of a future that did not happen, superimposed over the sadder, more prosaic one that did. Not unlike the augmented reality revealed by the Macguffin’d goggles of the title, which displayed the data of a new city superimposed over the old, I saw an old future superimposed over the now, the data being a memory of fast, fantastical things. The Bridge led somewhere else entirely. And in so doing, it became real.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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