Neil Hopcroft

[Read aloud to Adelle]

Virtual Light by William Gibson

I’m really enjoying rereading Gibsons works, this one doesn’t have quite the same ground breaking feel as Neuromancer. It is set in in a similar dystopia where society has fractured with the extinction of the middle class. The poor get by living in shanty towns built on the ruins of infrastructure destroyed by earthquakes while the rich have control over everything that matters.

The story here is quite linear and not nearly as densely packed as some of his other works – which makes it an easier read. It follows the story of the theft of some glasses and the attempts of some interested parties to reacquire them.

The world it is set in happens to be a future world, but there is nothing about the story that need be set in the future, and certainly most of the technologies are now available in some guise or another, if not the earthquake torn infrastructure. That said, the future world is one of the things that appeals to me, getting lost in a world somewhat like a potential future, and the further into that future we get the more a sense of alternate there is, we are looking sideways at another timeline, not forward to a potential one.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, of course I would.