All posts tagged Virtual Light

All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson (1999)

Nothing dates quicker than the future. All Tomorrow’s Parties is the title of a song by the Velvet Underground recorded in 1967. The choice of a Velvet Underground track as the title of a novel supposedly set in a hi-tech future confirms the sense that Gibson, born in 1948, despite being credited with the invention of futuristic visions of cyberspace and cyberpunk, in fact has a very 1960s/70s mentality, all dark glasses and leather jackets and ripped t-shirts.

Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

This is the third in Gibson’s ‘Bridge Trilogy’ and reunites us with key characters from the earlier two novels, notably:

  • Berry Rydell (security guard and protagonist of Virtual Light)
  • derelict computer hacker Colin Laney (the protagonist of Idoru)
  • Shinya Yamazaki, self-described ‘student of existential sociology’ who appears in both the previous books
  • former bicycle courier Chevette

It’s ten or 20 years in the future, after a big earthquake (nicknamed ‘the Little Big One’, page 160) hit California, resulting in the state officially dividing into two administrations, NoCal and SoCal.

The earthquake rendered the famous Golden Gate bridge so unstable that it was closed to traffic and very quickly became a shanty town, a favela, people building shacks and shops out of spare parts and random kit on the lower and main levels of the bridge, then slowly building above these, using the massive cables and struts as superstructure to create a slum stretching up into the sky.

It had all been open then, just girders and railing and deck: now it was this tunnel, everything patched together out of junk, used lumber, plastic, whatever people could find, all of it lashed up however anybody could get it to stay, it looked like… (page 185)

The Bridge is populated by all kinds of lowlife, criminals, popup shops, computer hackers, fast food joints, seedy micro-hotels, wasted dudes trying to sell you drugs and so on. It sounds a lot like the rundown parts of New York in the 1970s, because William Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction. Hey man, take a walk on the wild side.

The characters use a would-be street slang which sometimes feels curiously dated. When the character Tessa refers to nightclubs she knows, she includes one named ‘Cognitive Dissidence’, quite a heavy-handed play on the modish phrase, ‘cognitive dissonance’, like the comically themed nightclubs in Idoru.

But when her friend Chevette says, ‘Yeah, she knows ‘”Cog Diss”‘ – the books seems to assume that abbreviating Cognitive Dissidence to Cog Diss indicates how wildly street and hip and in the know and down with the kids Chevette is, but – it made me laugh at its crapness. Increasingly, I am associating Gibson not with some far-out digital future, but with Lou Reed and ageing Dad Rock (def: ‘music played by old white dudes’).

This impression is bolstered by the role played in all these novels by:

  1. the very old-tech format of TV shows (Rydell wanted to be on a cop TV show, Tessa makes TV documentaries)
  2. guitar music. In fact the novel includes an actual rock band, a collection of ageing white dudes led by one Buell Creedmore (see below) and includes other (fictional) rock bands with stupid names, which Gibson has referred to throughout the trilogy, such as ‘Chrome Koran’ and ‘Blue Ahmed’

This is the seventh Gibson novel I’ve read and certain elements are a fixture:

  1. Something is about to happen, something big, he can’t tell you what it is but it’s gonna be big. Thus Laney, the guy who was experimented on at his orphanage (page 71) and as a result has developed a supernatural ability to recognise patterns in the vast reams of data flowing through the net, he knows something is coming, something which will change everything.
  2. The basic mindset is 1940s film noir, hardboiled crime genre, Raymond Chandler for the internet age. Guys are tough, dames are tough as well, but generally need rescuing by tougher guys. Thus the two main male characters in this novel are Berry Rydell, the tough security guard we met in the previous novels of the trilogy, and an even harder tough guy, a silent assassin who thinks, speaks and moves with Zen detachment, a man with no name (lol, really, I’m not kidding) until we do, finally, get his name, towards the end of the book. But for most of the text we are kept wondering, ‘Who is he?’ ‘What is he seeking?’
  3. The novel is made up of four or five storylines, each focusing on a lead character, which run separately and distinctly throughout the book but with the strong suggestion that they’re all going to link up somehow, towards the end, which is also when the Big Thing which has been hinted at throughout will finally take place.

The first and third of these elements in particular, make for a very strong narrative grip or attraction. All through the book we’re kept on tenterhooks wondering what The Big Thing is going to turn out to be, although with the nagging suspicion that, as with a number of the previous novels, The Big Thing might actually turn out to be a disappointment (as, for example, the vague and underwhelming marriage of a pop singer and a virtual woman in Idoru).

The book is 277 pages long and divided into 73 chapters giving an average of 3.8 pages per chapter, although many of them only run to 1 or 2 pages. That’s to say, the narrative moves at pace, cleverly constructed to jump between the activities of the four or five leading characters. These are:

Berry Rydell

Rydell is a rough, tough, handsome man, ‘all muscle and long legs’ (page 181). He was a cop back in Knoxville, Tennessee, till he killed a drugged-up abuser who was firing randomly into a closet where he’d locked his girlfriend’s kids. Forced to quit the police, Rydell joined a security operation, IntenSecure. Then he was hired by a TV show which turned nobodies into celebrities in order to knock them down, but became increasingly unhappy with it, specially after he was unable to prevent a woman the show was persecuting from killing herself. So he quit TV and ended up working as security in a hotel. Here he was spotted and recommended for a job as security to a pop star in Japan, Rez, who was planning to ‘marry’ a totally digital woman, and this was the plot of the previous novel in the series, Idoru.

We learn that after the events described in Idoru Rydell made it back to America, to Los Angeles, where he was working as security, again, this time for a chain of convenience stores called Lucky Dragon, owned by a Korean. For a while he lived with Chevette who he hooked up with during the previous novel and thought he was going to feature in a documentary about hard-done-by cops, made by the Cops In Trouble series. But slowly all his hopes fizzled away, and Rydell became so sad Chevette that left him (page 182) and he got the convenience store job.

It is here that, one day, he takes a phone call from Colin Laney, who was the one who fixed him up with the job in Japan, and now tells him he’s got a job for him up in San Francisco.

So Rydell quits the Lucky Dragon job and drives up to Frisco. He does so in a carshare arranged by his fellow security cop, Durius. The guy sharing the car is an aggressive drunk named Buell Creedmore. He’s a pain in the butt and when Rydell arrives in SF and parks the car, we think he’s walking away from Creedmore, but Creedmore continues to turn up through the book and we discover he is quite a decent country and western singer who sings with ‘legendary’ guitarist Randall James Branch Shoats from Mobile, Alabama (page 100).

Colin Laney

Laney was one of a cohort of kids at an orphanage in Kentucky who were experimented on without their knowledge or consent. They were given an experimental drug, 5-SB.

‘5-SB allows the apprehension of nodal points, discontinuities in the texture of information. They indicate emergent change, but not what that change will be.’ (page 194)

Its effect was to make Laney supersensitive to the flow and shape of information flooding through the (still fairly primitive) internet (page 75).

At one point in his career Laney was a quantitative analyst for Slitscan, a tabloid TV show ‘of quite monumental viciousness’ (page 222). In Idoru he was hired as co-ordinator of internet data helping to create and curate the digital woman. Now we learn the idoru has left Rez who, in mourning has undertaken a rock tour of the Kombinat states (i.e. the old Soviet Union) and Laney, ill with probable tuberculosis, poor and decrepit, has gone into hiding in a large cardboard box hidden in the bowels of Shinjuku station, which he rents off a wordless Japanese man who spends all day silently making models.

This is where Shinya Yamazaki, an ‘existential sociologist’ who featured in both the previous novels, tracks him down and tries to bring him antibiotics and food. But Laney is too obsessed to eat. Right at the start of the book he tells Yamazaki that the datasets are building towards a seismic change. ‘What’s going to change?’ asks Yamazaki. Everything, replies Laney, thus creating the sense of suspense which keeps the reader turning the next 250 pages.

We also learn what happened to Rez and the idoru after the end of the previous novel. Basically, Laney was hired in the period covered by Idoru to facilitate the ‘marriage’ of the rock star Rez and the ’emergent digital being’, Rei Toei. That novel ended with the couple getting ‘married’ and going off to a newly-built circular island in Tokyo Bay. Now we learn that after that, Laney was kept on to educate this digital being, Rei Toei but that, as she grew and learned more about the world, she grew away from Rez. Laney realised he was falling in love with this being made entirely of data and so, one day, quit his job (pages 163 to 164). Soon afterwards he heard Rei had left the island, the marriage was over, and so Laney went into hiding, hiding out in the cardboard box buried deep in Shinjuku station.

Laney now devotes himself all day long to being the unfiltered ‘eye’ through which all the data in the world passes, via DatAmerica. And he sees a massive change coming. And the change is something to do with Cody Harwood, Machiavellian CEO of Harwood Levine, the most powerful PR company in the world.

The Man with no name

He wears a long coat, a loden coat. Round-lenses glasses which hide his eyes. He was in the military. He wastes no movement or word. He is ‘Lean and concise’ (page 220). He follows the Tao. He believes only in the moment.

We meet him in a chapter where he is tailed onto the Bridge by a couple of lowlife drug addicts. When they try to mug him he kills them both with silent movement of his hands, holding a super-sharp knife, too quick to see or defend from. He is watched by the muggers’ young mute hanger-on, known as Silencio because he doesn’t talk. No name takes Silencio to a diner and buys him fruit shakes and, when the boy is fascinated by the old wristwatch he’s wearing, gives it to him.

In the middle section of the book we see the man with no name in his spartan hotel room performing his secret assassin exercises, or sharpening his super-sharp assassin’s knife in ritualised movements. Despite the cheesiness of all this I couldn’t help finding it at the same time everso ‘cool’, as it is designed to be.

Fontaine

Fontaine is ‘an angular black man whose graying hair is twisted into irregular branches that hang like the arms of a dusty houseplant in need of water’ (page 159). He is harassed by his two wives Tourmaline and Clarisse. He keeps a popup second-hand shop on the Bridge, specialising in gadgets, wristwatches a speciality. It was Fontaine who cobbled together a home-made stairlift up to the shack belonging to a man named Skinner, up on a higher level of the favella, and whic Chevette, who lived with much older Skinner, used to use to take her bike down to ground level to carry out her job as a bicycle courier, all of this described in the first of the trilogy, Virtual Light.

One morning Fontaine notices Silencio’s nose pressed against the glass. He lets him in and, after some initial nervousness about whether he’s a burglar, lets him stay, starts buying him meals, lets him sleep out back – not least because Silencio lets Fontaine have the awesome watch which the Man with No Name gave him.

Soon Silencio gravitates from staring at Fontaine’s watch collection to being given a pair of eyephones and scanning at speed through all the watches available at all the auctions round the world. Silencio starts to talk but all he does is repeat the technical specifications of the watches he’s looking at.

Chevette

In the previous novels we met Chevette-Marie Washington in her capacity of bicycle courier and carer for the ageing Skinner, who had taken her in and fed her when she was young and homeless. Then she had an affair and lived with rough tough Berry Rydell for a while. As this novel opens she is living in a house rented out to students on the coast of Los Angeles. The house is fenced off from the beach where there has been some kind of disastrous unnamed chemical ‘spill’.

Chevette’s main housemate is Tessa who’s Australian and a media sciences student at USC (page 32). Tessa wants to make a documentary about the Bridge using Chevette as a way in to its closed and secretive society. She regards the Bridge as ‘interstitial’, an adjective Chevette takes the piss out of for the rest of the book.

Tessa’s recently been playing with a camera on a small drone. Chevette has barely woken up before she and housemate Tessa spot a man snooping round the house. It is Carson, Chevette’s ex-boyfriend, smooth, handsome, in the media working for a show called ‘Real One’ (everyone works in TV in these novels). He was Chevette’s boyfriend till the night he hit her. She moved out and went into hiding in this abandoned beachfront property. Now he’s found her.

So to avoid Carson, the women sneak out the back way and round to Tessa’s van. She’s already packed. Chevette never unpacked. They slip into the van, fire the ignition and spurt away. Whither? Well, Tessa wants to make a doc about the Bridge so they head north, to NoCal and San Francisco.

Plot developments

These days Laney phones his mate Rydell at regular intervals. He instructs Rydell to contact his attorney, F.X. Tong, which he does via videoglasses. Rydell has a knackered pair given to him by the cashier at the Lonely Dragon, Miss Praisegod Satansbane (page 11). The ‘shades’ are originally from Brazil so when Rydell touches the instruction panel in the wing of the shades he often gets a street map of Rio and everything in Portuguese, but nothing’s perfect.

Through a bad connection Tong gives him instructions to use the ATM in the branch of the Lucky Dragon near the start of the Bridge, then go to the GlobEx franchise at the back, use the identity code Tong gives him and collect a package. All of which he does. The package is a couple of feet long, six inches square and very heavy. Rydell carries it further onto the Bridge, finds an anonymous popup hotel and greasy spoon, the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, which rents him a tiny room, really only a horizontal pod.

There’s more. Laney calls Rydell and tells him to go to a particular computer accessory shop and pick up some cables. It’s called Bad Sector and staffed by an enormous Chinese youth with an irritating under-moustache. He devises little robots which toddle around the shop counter and hand out and receive goods to and from customers.

Back in the pod Rydell finally unwraps the package to discover it contains a metal object like a thermos flask, figures out how to attach the cables, powers it up and… out appears a hologram of the emergent digital being from the previous novel, Rei Toei, beautiful, immaculate, seductive, very intelligent, and Rydell is entranced.

Chevette and Tessa arrive in San Francisco and park the van by the Bridge. They stroll around and into a bar where, by quite a big coincidence, there’s Buell Creedmore who is about to perform with ‘legendary’ guitarist Shoats. Before the performance has even begun, Chevette sees, by an even bigger coincidence, her feared ex, Carson, walk in,

Laney phones Rydell again, tells him the world is going to end. Well, the world as we know it (page 166). Laney is convinced the crisis will crystallise around a dude named Cody Harwood, a lean, rich head of a major public relations firm.

Separately, Laney becomes uneasily aware that someone is watching him when, in the dataflow, he is watching Harwood. He is shocked when two fellow hackers from Mexico City tell him it is Harwood watching him watching Harwood, because Harwood has himself taken the experimental drug 5-SB and so gained heightened awareness of the flows of information through the world’s datasets.

Laney’s informants from Mexico (Rooster and Klaus) tell him that Harwood is rich and has interests in a range of mega corporations including Nanofax AG of Geneva:

‘Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance.’ (page 195)

So we know that Harwood has taken 5-SB and so has advanced nodal apprehension, and is installing Nanofax modules in every Lucky Dragon store, because he has a controlling interest in that franchise as well (page 209). But what’s he ultimately up to?

We see Harwood ordering minions to keep monitoring Laney and to find whoever it was who collected the package Laney had FedExed from Japan i.e. the thermos device which contains Rei Toei. Remember the two street hoodlums who the Man with No Name silently knifed earlier on? Now Laney phones Rydell and tells him to go to the crime scene. Why? Because it will trigger the next stage, though Laney doesn’t know what.

Rydell is tailed So Rydell goes along and, sure enough, Harwood has minicams monitoring the scene so immediately uses facial recognition to identify Rydell and access his entire past history. Harwood dispatches some toughs to tail him. Cut to Rydell being tailed for a few blocks across the Bridge, particularly by some guy in black with a scarf. He thinks he’s cleverly evaded them when he turns a corner and is punched so hard in the side by an enormous dud that he feels some ribs break. The big guy is shaping up for another punch when he goes quite, blank-faced, falls to his knees. The Man with No Name is behind him, has stabbed and killed him.

The bar with no name The Man with No Name marches Rydell away but as they pass the nightclub (with no name) Rydell takes the opportunity to nip inside. He arrives just as Buell Creedmore is finishing his set with Tessa and Chevette (Rydell’s ex) also there. So at about this point the reader sees the plotlines led by the various characters finally coming together. Even more so when, to provoke no-name, Rydell activates the thermos (which he carries everywhere with him) and Rei Toei appears in the middle of the crowded bar to everyone’s astonishment.

Shootout But at that moment the band ends its performance, Chevette leaves the light and sound console where she’s been with Tessa, goes down to the main floor to capture the mini-drones Tessa’s been using to film the performance when, to her amazement, she is spun round and punched really hard in the face. It is her ex, Carson the woman beater. He advances on her to hit her again but is pulled round and punched hard by… by Rydell, her other lover!

Dazed Chevette is amazed. But Carson gets to his feet and punches Rydell hard in the ribs and we know they’re broken so Rydell squeals with pain. At which point he is pushed out the way and Chevette sees the guy with the scarf who had been tailing Rydell and has now arrived in the bar, step forward and shoot Carson with a silenced gun. Now she knows she’s in some kind of dream.

Tessa, from up in the lighting control booth, turns the lights out in the bar and there’s a stampede, people getting hurt. Rei Toei is like a genie, a stream of white light tormenting the shooter while Rydell in great pain lifts Chevette and helps her to a side door which they kick open and emerge into a street filling up with screaming punters. Chevette runs, Rydell limps after her, then both of them are stopped by the magical appearance of the Man with No Name carrying the thermos, which Rydell in the general panic had forgotten.

Fontaine’s Next thing we know they are beating on the locked door of Fontaine’s watch shop. Fontaine wakes (it’s the middle of the night) and reluctantly lets them in. In fact – we realise with a start – it is meant to be only 24 hours since the Man with No Name killed those two muggers on the bridge. Anyway, Fontaine recognises Chevette as the pretty young thing who lived in an apartment above his and who looked after Skinner before she left for LA. And the Man with No Name calmly recognises Silencio, who is also woken up by the noise, as the boy he took to the milk bar and gave his watch to.

So the gang’s all here. All the major characters have been brought together, with 40 pages or so of the novel left to go. So what is this Big Thing which we’ve been promised throughout the text?

The Man with No Name explains that Harwood has hired mercenaries to capture Rydell because he knows he has something important to Laney but isn’t sure what. Also, that the mercs will kill anyone who stands in their way. He asks for Fontaine’s gun and explains he’s going out to kill as many of the mercenaries as he can, that everyone else should remain holed up in Fontaine’s shop, and disappears through the door into the night.

There’s a shootout. The Man with No Name, inevitably, kills two of the mercs because that’s what Clint Eastwood types do. Rydell, crouching in Fontaine’s inner room, asks Fontaine if he has a weapon and the latter discloses a vicious chain-gun, owned by Fontaine’s lawyer (a paranoid refugee from the African Union) which he has hidden in a wall recess. They get it out, Rydell steps into the shop proper, someone fires off a bevy of automatic rifle, Ryfell aims in that direction and fires the chain gun which fires razor wire at high speed. It converts anyone in its way into hamburger. So that is the messy end of the third mercenary.

Cut to the head merc headphoning Harwood who instructs him to set the bridge on fire. Back in the shop the Man with No Name arrives and hands the gun back to Fontaine. Rydell takes a call from Laney on the Brazilian shades, Laney tells him the bridge is being torched but to leave the thermos / Rei Toei on the bridge. He plugs the thermo device into a power socket and Rei appears, a shimmering beautiful slender woman. She says hello to Rydell but then addresses the Man with No Name and tells him his name is Konrad. And that he still carries a torch for a slender blonde, Lise, who he lost back in the day. Aah. So the cold-hearted killer is a softie after all.

Out of nowhere Tessa arrives trailing drones with cameras, riding on a big three wheeler driven by Elmore, the skinny lighting guy from the club. Chevette and Rydell clamber onto it but can’t persuade Fontaine or the Silent kid to join them. Elmore turns the bike and roar off towards the San Francisco end of the bridge.

But they soon run into crowds fleeing the fire and get knocked off the bike. Tessa disappears, Rydell grabs for Chevette and loses the chain gun down a sewer pipe. Oops. Chevette leads Rydell to the steps up and to the little funicular train Fontaine made up to Skinner’s home-made apartment.

Meanwhile Laney has co-opted his friends in ‘the Walled City’. These are dissident Chinese hackers who were kicked out of the actual walled city when Hong Kong was handed back to China but created a digital alternative for nerds and hackers everywhere. Mustering their support, in cyberspace Laney suddenly finds himself face to face with Harwood. The latter is suave and debonair and insouciant like the baddies in all James Bond movies are. He is not sure what is going to happen and he disappears down into the flow of data.

Meanwhile Rydell and Chevette emerge onto the roof of Skinner’s pad only to be ambushed by the man with the black scarf, leader of the mercenaries. He pistol whips Rydell and then points the gun to kneecap him but Chevette begs him not to and he doesn’t. Instead he steps into the mini-glider he’s had stashed up here all the time. But as he steps over the edge of Skinner’s roof into the night sky, Chevette runs forward and with Skinner’s knife rips a long tear in the fabric, rendering the glider utterly useless and the mercenary plunges straight down, hitting pillars and stanchions like all the master baddy’s henchmen in every James Bond movie and cheap thriller movie ever made.

Chevette runs back to big strong Rydell (‘my man!’) and helps him sit up groggily. Now the smoke from the fire engulfs them and they start choking but at that very moment a helicopter bearing a vast load of ice cold water hoves into view just over them and dumps hundreds of tonnes of water onto the Bridge.

Meanwhile back at Fontaine’s shop, Rei Toei had told Konrad to plug the thermos into the eyephones Silencio uses. He enters cyberspace and Rei is with him. She tells him to follow the watch, the last watch he could see, and Silencio with his advanced obsessive feel for watches and nothing but watches follows it across the cyberverse and is suddenly in a small room in the bowels of a castle where he meets Harwood who is astonished to see him. Then some of the avatars from the Walled City appear and we know they have used Silencio’s skills to track down Harwood to his hiding place.

Meanwhile, back out in the real world, a black kid, Boomzilla, who we met much much earlier when Tessa and Chevette paid him to mind their van, he is in the Lucky Dragon branch nearest the Bridge, watching the crazy action, huge fire, fire engines everywhere, then choppers dropping vast amounts of water, anyway all this mayhem only slightly delays the first ever use of the Nanofax gadget.

Boomzilla watches a little speech being given saying the original Lucky Dragon statuette will be inserted in the Singapore headquarters and then rebuilt in every Lucky Dragon franchise around the world. Except that the light pings and out of the microwave-looking device unfolds a naked Japanese girl, slender and black-haired, smiles at everyone and runs out the front door.

Back on the Bridge it’s dawn. Rydell has spent the night with Chevette in the heavy duty sleeping bag the mercenary had used on Skinner’s roof. Very warm and cosy. He gets up, butt naked, pads to the edge to have a pee. There’s a hovering drone with Tessa’s voice blaring at a sleepy Chevette, that she, Tessa, got loads of footage during the fire, she’s got a contract to make her documentary (TV again).

Eventually the drone buzzes off. Rydell climbs down a layer and is surprised to find Buell Creedmore holed up there. He too climbed up to escape the flames. Well, the venue’s burned down, and Buell whines that his career is over. In what is probably meant to be a comical moment he reveals he ain’t a good ole boy country-and-western dude after all, he grew up in suburban New Jersey. And he starts crying.

Rydell climbs back to the roof and realises he is overwhelmingly in love with Chevette.

Cut to Konrad, the former Man with No Name, catching a cab to TransAmerica, the main mega corporation run by Harwood. Here he presents himself and is strip searched and handcuffed and accompanied to the lift by seven goons, as per Harwood’s instructions. But his weapon is in the belt buckle at front of his trousers. By the time the lift arrives he will have killed all of them. Because like the assassin / ninjas / superheroes of so many Yank movies, he is invulnerable.

Yamazaki has brought Keith Blackwell, the enormous Australian head of security of the pop singer Rez, who featured heavily in the previous novel, to rescue Laney. They go down to the cardboard city in the bowels of Shinjuku railway station and Blackwell razors open Laney’s carton. But he isn’t there.

Fontaine returns from the Red Cross stands at the end of the Bridge. Stuff is still being cleared up but there’s more media vans than emergency services. Silencio has been sweeping up the broken glass outside the shop and doing a good job. You get the sense Fontaine will adopt him. He reminds me of the mute boy sweeping up main street in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 coming-of-age movie, The Last Picture Show. This novel is written in Gibson’s cyberstyle, but it overflows with very traditional, down-home, American sentimentality.

And sure enough, in the final chapter, in the last scene, Silencio starts to talk!. He appears to be in charge of the shop now. And another boy brings in a ruined watch. And in a token of the future, the boy asks Silencio if he can watch the weird device fix his watch. They place the damaged watch onto ‘the bed’ and watch it sink into it as a coin into mud. Within its womb molecules work and within nine minutes the watch will emerge utterly restored good as new. The future is now.

Thoughts

Well, number one, it is a major achievement to think in these terms, to conceive of plots which revolve around dataflows and nodal points within cyberspace. Most people were struggling to adapt to the dial-up versions of the internet in 1999 while Gibson had already perfected a way of creating entrancing fictions out of it.

And Gibson’s highly engineered prose poetry is phenomenal. He has all kinds of tricks up his sleeve to keep it pumping – short phrases, omitting subjects of sentences, slang, streetwise allusions to keep you constantly on your toes. Modern thriller basic tricks.

  • Fontaine looked at Rydell. Pursed his lips. Nodded. (page 234)
  • Hole there the size of a saucer, and getting bigger. (page 261)

Short sentences. Leave out subject. Makes it hipper. Cool style.

But… but… although the book has countless clever angles and is written in a highly stylised, tech savvy, thriller style… key scenes include a fight in a bar and a shootout around a shop where the good guys have been pinned down by the bad guys. It feels like Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) or the familiar rundown seedy future wreckage of a movie like Escape From New York (1981). In other words, at numerous places the actual storyline and events feel hackneyed, clichéd, and filled with the over-familiar tropes of ten thousand American action movies.

Paint it black

And black. Everyone wears black. Of course they do, because it’s cool. Rydell wears a black t-shirt. Chevette is wearing black jeans and a black sweatshirt. The lead mercenary wears a black leather coat and a black scarf. Two other mercs were a black leather jacket and a black armoured vest (page 241). The skinny drug addict who runs the lights at the club where Buell performs and then the fight breaks out, he wears a black meshbacked cap and a black t-shirt (page 246). Everyone wears black because black is cool and fashionable, what people wear in fashion shoots, in edgy ads, in movies like The Matrix. It’s the only colour Lou Reed wore and Gibson is the Lou Reed of science fiction.

World-shattering claims, tiny cast

Gibson’s novels use the rhetoric of world-changing worldshifts. But in the end the stories only involve about fifteen characters (the speaking parts in this one are Durius, Rydell, Buell, Shoat, their girlfriend Maryalice, Tessa, Chevette, Konrad, Fontain, Silencio, Elmore, Laney, Carson, Harwood, lead mercenary).

Not only that, but they are all sane. What I mean is they’re all cut from the same basic thriller cloth, they all think with the same rational clarity, they all act with that thriller directness and logic (with the possible exception of the Man with No Name who is, therefore, the most interesting character). When the fire starts Fontaine briefly alludes to the feral kids growing up on the Bridge but, when you stop and think about it, there is absolutely no reference to the psychological impact of growing up in the Bridge favelas. In fact when you stop and reflect, there is pretty much no psychology in any of these novels. All the characters are capable and competent, good at fighting, handy with guns, behave like cardboard characters from action movies. Nobody panics, goes to pieces or doesn’t know what to do.

Compare and contrast Gibson’s fiction with the stories of J.G. Ballard who specialises in characters who collapse into private psychoses, weird private visions, and whose stories create in the reader a sense of being seriously adrift, trapped in a world completely at odds with the usual one (The Drought, The Drowned World, High Rise, Concrete Island).

There’s never any sense of the genuinely strange in Gibson – with the one shining exception of the way he describes characters like Laney experiencing cyberspace, plugging in and suddenly being amid canyons of gleaming data, the ‘grey fields of light’ (page 254). Now that is new and vivid and wonderful.

But a lot of the rest of the action could come from a standard Jack Reacher novel, with rough, tough manly hero (Rydell) saving his girl (Chevette), forging a brief friendship with the black dude (Fontaine) helped by the mysterious stranger (Konrad) and in which the baddy is, as always, the unscrupulous rich (white) head of some mega-corporation.

Rei Toei may be a cool invention, an entirely digital being, but every time she appears she is, for the first second, butt naked and very beautiful (as Chevette notices with intense jealousy first time she appears to Rydell). Beautiful, naked young Japanese girls. Hardly subverting action movie clichés, is it, or the basic stereotypes of all action narratives, whether in thrillers, movies or graphic novels or comics.

In that respect, far from feeling out there and experimental, most of Gibson’s fiction feels fantastically familiar from any number of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise action adventure movies. Die Hard With A Laptop.

Also, Rei Toei may be a cool invention, the first entirely digital being and yet…what does she actually do? What does she change or make happen? It feels a lot like Gibson can come up with these great ideas, images, digital symbols but then… really struggles to make them relevant to the real world, to come up with a plot which justifies the hype.

Oh, and the Big Thing, When The World Changed, The Thing Which Was Going To Change Everything which was heavily trailed throughout the novel, designed to keep the reader on the edge of their seat?

As so often in a Gibson novel, it doesn’t, in fact, happen. Nothing changes. The world does not come to an end. Cody Harwood seems to be trying to pull off some scam but we never understand what it is. So now an American convenience store franchise is going to be able to do 3-D printing? Hmmm. Not world shattering is it?

Instead a young, thin, naked Japanese girl steps out of a microwave. Maybe we’re meant to interpret this as the advent of a New Era in Human History because we’ve invented teleporting. But, in fictional terms, it pales into insignificance next to the classic tough guy Rydell holding his babe Chevette round the shoulders as dawn broke over the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge, shucks.

A month or so after reading the book all I really remember about it is the Golden Gate Bridge being set on fire and the shootout at the shop, both of them hard-core 1970s action movie tropes.

Credit

All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1999. All references are to the 2000 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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Posted by Simon on April 16, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/16/all-tomorrows-parties-william-gibson/

Idoru by William Gibson (1996)

Arleigh’s van smelled of long-chain monomers and warm electronics.
(Idoru page 201)

Virtual Light, the first novel in William Gibson’s ‘Bridge trilogy’, made me fall out of love with Gibson. Once I’d realised the tough ex-cop hero of the book, Berry Rydell was, underneath all the sci-fi add-ons, basically an avatar of John McClane from the Die Hard movies or Jack Reacher, i.e. a rough, tough hero of the type found in all airport thrillers, I found myself noticing on every page, barely disguised by Gibson’s gee-whizz, cyberpunk style and settings, all the clichés of the American thriller genre.

However, I think Idoru is by way of being a return to form, combining Gibson’s street-smart, cyberpunk attitude and jive prose style, with passages of genuinely visionary writing about the experience of cyberspace and virtual reality, passages as strange and poetic and haunting as anything in Neuromancer. I liked it, though with a few reservations, which I’ll explain at the end.

Plot summary

It’s a few decades into what was then the future, maybe about 2010, after a fictional mega-earthquake has devastated Tokyo and San Francisco, leading to the abandonment of the Golden Gate Bridge to thousands of squatters who’ve built a shanty town on it (which is why these three books are known as the Bridge trilogy).

Colin Laney has a natural talent for spotting patterns and nodes in information. He gets a job at Slitscan, a downmarket scandal TV channel, ‘descended from reality programming’. His boss is an intense woman named Kathy Torrance, who has jaded views about celebrity, namely that celebrities deserve to be made famous then crushed by media outlets like hers. A typical Slitscan ‘story’ is the revelation that a popular band, the Dukes of Nuke ‘Em, uses Iraqi fetal tissue to remain youthful looking, supposedly a shock-horror revelation although, in this cynical world, the story leads only to a surge in the band’s record sales and a bout of hangings and executions in Iraq among the officials responsible.

Laney is employed to scour DatAmerica (which appears to be the corporate version of the internet) for links, connections, ‘nodal points’, assembling clusters out of the vast oceans of data which hint towards news and gossip which the TV channel can use.

But Laney quits the job at Slitscan after a job wrecking someone’s reputation goes too far, and he finds himself staying in an expensive hotel, ‘the Chateau’. Here the security guard, Rydell (who we recognise as the hero of Idoru‘s predecessor, Virtual Light), recommends an opening he knows about out in Tokyo, which turns out to be a tip he heard from another character from Virtual Light, the Japanese sociologist Shinya Yamazaki (still making notes in his electronic notebook with a lightpen as he did in the earlier novel) who’s now working for a new employer.

So, on this recommendation, Laney the node detector flies out to Tokyo and is met by Keith Alan Blackwell, an enormous Australian with one ear missing and a body criss-crossed by scars. Laney is tired, jet-lagged and wants to know what the job is about.

Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline, a teenage girl, Chia Mackenzie from Seattle (page 85) also flies out to Tokyo. She is an advanced user of plug-in digital reality programs, a favourite being ‘the sandbenders’ (the hand-made product of a commune she describes on page 138) which she plugs in, then puts on the eyephones and whoosh! she’s walking around Venice in the moments before dawn, accompanied by her ‘Music Master’, a thinly disguised digital David Bowie. So she’s a teenage pop music fan.

Mackenzie is a big fan of the band Lo/Rez which appears to consist of two people, Lo the Chinese guitarist and Rez, the half-Irish singer (page 94), famous for their album, Dog Soup. Lo/Rez have a worldwide fanclub among pubescent girls and Chia is a member of the Seattle fan club. In the opening chapter we find her and a couple of girlfriends all jacked into cyberspace and discussing the scandalous news that singer Rez has declared he wants to marry a virtual woman, nothing more than a system of programs. One of the girls, Kelsey, has access to her dad’s frequent flyer account and so she buys Chia a plane ticket to Tokyo so she can go over there and find out what is going on and report back to the rest of the teenage Lo/Rez fans.

On the plane to Tokyo Chia is befriended by a suspicious-looking woman, a fake blonde with hair implants, one of which she pulls out and inserts in the DNA control which is now common at these airports of the future.

The blonde calls herself Maryalice (page 47), hands Chia a suitcase to take through passport control for her, and then disappears: clearly there’s something dodgy in the case, clearly Chia is very naive. Without her realising it, Maryalice also slipped something into Chia’s hand luggage, a cigarette carton-sized metal object…

The narrative is carefully structured. The Laney and Chia plotlines alternate neatly like a tennis rally throughout the book. But there’s also extensive use of flashback to fill in backstory. It is a nicely engineered text.

Laney has barely unpacked before he’s met and is taken out for drinks and sushi by the enormous Blackwell, with skinny little sociologist Yamazaki in attendance and so, in a series of flashbacks, Laney tells his backstory i.e. the job at Slitscan and why he quit.

We learn Laney quit because he was tasked with finding out about a young woman, Alison Shires, who was having an affair with a famous movie star, and so was a ripe target for a Slitscan scandal program. But Laney’s supernatural ability to scope data had made him increasingly fearful that Shires was going to kill herself, till one feverish night he went round to her apartment, let himself in (being a data hacker he knows all her security numbers) only to find her slitting her wrists. Laney stops her, patches the wrists up, but trips and bangs his head which stuns him long enough for her to get up, walk into the kitchen and shoot herself.

The cops come quickly, but more importantly so do representatives of a media outlet called ‘Out of Control’ which makes TV programmes about TV programmes and want to screw Laney’s employers, Slitscan.

Upset by how they set him onto Alison Shires but gave the poor woman no help, Laney agrees to stiff his old employers. So the Out of Control people put him on a contract, give him lawyers to help with the cops, and put him up at the luxury hotel, ‘the Chateau’, packed with their staffers and lawyers and producers. So this is how he comes to meet Rydell, the hero of Virtual LIght, now reduced to working as a security guard there (page 69) and who, when he learns Laney is a digital whizz, gives him the tipoff about the job in Japan.

On the plane flight Maryalice had told Chia about her boyfriend Eddie, and he meets them at the airport and they offer Chia a lift into town and then invite her up to their apartment. From the whole treatment, I’d be astonished if Chia doesn’t get caught up in some criminal scam… and indeed, it’s only at this point, about a quarter into the book, that we discover that Chia is, indeed, only 14-years-old, not a young woman at all, but genuinely a naive child (p.86).

Back in the bar, Blackwell finally explains who he is to Laney. Blackwell is chief of security for the world-famous band Lo/Rez which we’ve heard so much about (page 72). Somebody has ‘got at’ Rez (maybe the Russian ‘Kombinat’, which appears to be a name for Russian organised crime) and Blackwell wants Laney to use his node analysis skills to find out who (page 73).

Meanwhile, Eddie and Maryalice take Chia up to their apartment above a bar, which turns out to be more like a warehouse, stuffed with cartons and a bank of monitors managed by a Japanese named Calvin. When Eddie and Maryalice lock themselves into the office and start having a row, Calvin whispers to Chia asking if she’s ‘part of it’ and when she says, ‘No, part of what?’, he hustles her out of the apartment, into a talking elevator, tells her how to get to the nearest tube station and the hell away before it’s too late.

So off scoots Chia and uses a public digital docking port to contact a Tokyo member of the international fan club for Lo/Rez (like the Bay City Rollers of my youth, like the Take That fans of a few decades ago). She hooks up with a local member and goes to her house. This local fan is Mitsuko, aged 13. Hmmm. So this plotline is about teenyboppers, about gushy teenage girls. The two girls pop on earclips which translate from English to Japanese and the reverse so they can talk to each other.

We learn more about ‘the Sandbenders’, virtual tech built by a commune in Oregon: to use it, you slip silver thimbles over your finger and thumb tips and affix wrist straps, put on eyephones and then you are in the virtual reality program of your choice, in Chia’s case, a beautified version of Venice, empty of tourists, just before dawn (page 89).

Idoru On page 92 we discover what an idoru is. It means ‘idol-singer’ in Japanese. This particular idoru is a virtual woman. A digital creation. Unreal. She is named Rei Toei. She is a ‘personality construct’, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers (as Yamazaki explains it on page 92).

Chia is invited to a meeting of the Tokyo chapter of the Lo/Rez fanclub, which confirms more than ever that it is a fanclub of teenage girls, linked in hyperspace, dedicated to revering Lo/Rez. There is some cultural relativity stuff comparing American and Japanese fans i.e. the Japanese, even though schoolgirls, are formal and considered and first of all give Chia a thorough history of the creation of their ‘chapter’, then politely turn to her to give a similar history of the Seattle ‘chapter’. However, being a crude Yank, Chia ignores all that and blurts out her question about Rez – ‘Is it true he wants to marry a virtual woman?’

By this stage it is crystal clear that the Chia storyline and the Laney storyline are both about Rez and the virtual woman, and the reader can see that they will, at some point, converge.

It’s worth noting that the characters jack into cyberspace more in the first fifty pages of this novel than in all of Virtual Light put together (one of the weaknesses of that book) and that when they do, the descriptions of their cyber-experiences are brilliant, in a way Gibson patented and excels at. The description of the haunting empty cyber-Venice; or the meeting place the Tokyo chapter have created (since none of them are physically in the same room), a pagoda created from digital data; and the way the half dozen teenage girls in it have created their digital avatars, all this is vividly and brilliantly done.

After Chia’s left the Tokyo fanclub meeting, she has has a separate online meeting with a friend from the Seattle chapter, Zona Rosa, who lives in Mexico City and is famous for her bad temper and for the vast private cyber-program she’s created, an Arizona desert-type environment complete with lizards and cacti.

Anyway, this Zona tells Chia that someone is snooping after her data and has contacted their mutual friend Kelsey, the girl who used her dad’s frequent flyer points to buy Chia’s plane ticket. I.e. the standard thriller trope ‘Someone’s after you!’.

But the cyber-environment is brilliantly described: it’s cool how Zona’s encryption program is represented by a lizard she at first is holding, then places on the lapel of her jacket to signify that she’s turning up the security settings. That’s the kind of vivid realisation of the codes and protocols people create in this cyberworld which Gibson really excels at, which he made his own.

Back to Laney who now understands who’s hired him and why. Blackwell takes him back to an office full of other digital techs and monitors etc, introduces him round, then asks him to jack into the system, being DatAmerica, the world’s largest set of cyberdata, and look for Rez’s personal data.

With his eyephones on, Laney sees random artefacts, binoculars, a palm tree by the sea, a link fence around a stone fort. He’s been sent in to find digital traces of Rez, but can see nothing. In fact it’s eerily void of digital traces…

Meanwhile, Chia meets Mitsuko’s 17-year-old brother Masahiko. He is a digital denizen, an otaku (‘a Japanese term for people with consuming interests, particularly in anime and manga’, in Masahiko’s case a consuming interest in virtual reality hacking) who spends most of his time curating ‘the Walled City‘ a secretive digital community.

Laney returns to his hotel to find a fax (a fax!) from Rydell telling Laney a bunch of techs and staff from Slitscan came to the Chateau searching for Laney, seem have discovered that Rydell has rung him a few times in Japan, so they left and told one of the garage attendants they were going to Tokyo, presumably after Laney, it’s not really clear why.

I.e. more or less the same thriller trope as we just saw applied to Chia, namely ‘They’re coming to get you!’

Meanwhile, Matsoku takes Chia on a subway ride, then through umpteen streets, past hi-tech Tokyo buildings and adverts to track down ‘the Monkey Boxing Club’. Why? because it was in this club that Rez grabbed the DJ’s mic and announced to the world that he intended to marry an idoru, a virtual reality woman. They interview the disgruntled wiry DJ (Jun) who tells them that Lo/Rez’s people promptly bought up the club and closed it down, making all employees sign non-disclosure agreements.

Remember the roomful of techs Blackwell introduced Laney to, before he put on the eyephones and entered the matrix and tried to find traces of Rez? Well, one of them now turns up at his hotel, a slender young woman named Arleigh McCrae (page 129).

In line with the book’s extensive use of flashbacks, Laney proceeds to tell her the story of why he was dropped like a hot potato by Out of Control. He was lazing by the pool at the Chateau when his minder, Rice Daniels, arrived with a wise old lawyer, Aaron Pursley, who gets Laney to confirm that when he was at a federal orphanage in Gainesville from age 12 to 17 the authorities experimented on him with an experimental new behaviour drug, 5-SB. Well, long-term studies of this drug now show it is connected to male patients becoming psychotic stalkers. I.e. if it comes to a lawsuit between Slitscreen and Out of Control, the latter’s lawyers will be able to assert that Laney didn’t go to see Alison Shires to protect her but because he is a fame-obsessed psychotic due to his early drug experience.

Laney has to admit that all these facts are correct, at which point the lawyer packs up his bag and leaves – and within hours Laney, his evidence now worthless for the TV show, finds his contract with Out Of Control has been terminated and the company ceases to pick up his hotel bills (pages 131 to 134). He’d been dumped. He’s on his own. It was at this point that Rydell, knowing the situation and having, in fact, experienced something similar himself, made the suggestion about the job in Tokyo…

Back in the present, Arleigh takes Laney out for a drink (to a downstairs bar themed after American chewing gum) and gives him the backstory of Blackwell. Turns out Blackwell rescued Rez when he gave a concert at a high-security Australian gaol and was kidnapped by Italian inmates. Blackwell, also an inmate, got into the cell where Rez was being held and killed three of the Italians with a tomahawk before the other two fled, Blackwell released Rez and handed him over to the authorities. Rez’s lawyers got Blackwell released from prison a few months later and he’s been Rez’s bodyguard ever since.

Remember how Maryalice, as well as making Chia take her bag through customs, slipped a hard rectangular object into her hand luggage? When she rediscovers this, Chia is in two minds about whether to dump it at the various locations she visits, but doesn’t… The reader rightly suspects a lot of the plot is going to be about this mystery object…

Now Chia and Masahiko are on a tube train going to meet someone at a restaurant when Masahiko receives a message on his tablet warning him that Russians are at the restaurant (above which he and his sister live) asking after them. Masahiko suspects it’s the Kombinat, the Russian criminal underworld who have been mentioned off and on throughout the novel.

In a gaming arcade they meet a mate of Masahiko’s, Gomi Boy. Gomi Boy explains that he and Masahiko have both got responsibilities to maintain ‘the Walled City’, and that, when they heard enquiries were being made about Chia’s cashcard, Gomi Boy went to Masahiko’s and removed his computer, for protection.

Gomi Boy says that a bit later Eddie and Maryalice’s car turned up at the restaurant where they were going to meet (Chia remembers the description of the car, it’s a Daihatsu Graceland). Gomi Boy asked some nearby skaterboys to report if anything else unusual happened and they phoned 20 minutes later to report a smaller car turning up and three bulky Russians getting out and going into the restaurant.

To summarise the story so far

We now know that Eddie and Maryalice are after Chia and the Russian mafia are also asking after her. By now Chia is really, really scared and wants to go home. But she can’t ‘port’ or call her friends from a public portal, she’ll be traced, similarly she cannot now buy anything with her cashcard, which has also been traced and tagged. She’s stuck.

Rock bands with teenybopper fan clubs, bars with silly themes (right at the start there’d been a Kafka-themed bar, then the one plastered with bubblegum brands), noisy amusement arcades, skateboard gangs, cheesy TV shows, nerdy teenagers obsessed with computer games and gadgets and showing off smoking. Brilliant though the cyberspace descriptions are, many aspects of the plot strike me as not really being fiction for adults. Surely it’s teen fiction? Young adult fiction?

More plot developments

This dawning suspicion was reinforced by the next scene, in which Masahiko and Gomi Boy decide it’s a smart move to check into a Tokyo love (i.e. sex) hotel, because it’s a good place to port and or use cashcards anonymously.

(The hotel is humorously named the Hotel Di, presumably after Princess Diana, but with the same kind of tuppenny pun on the verb ‘die’ that you get in James Bond movie titles.) This prompts a passage about a 14-year-old girl (Chia) opening various cupboards and discovering various sex aids, dildos and rubber vaginas, sitting on the bed and it starts to move up and down etc. All this, I imagine, was intended to be comic, but in 2021’s neo-Victorian moral climate, came over as distinctly dubious.

Meanwhile, Blackwell takes Laney and Arleigh to a club which was created within days of the catastrophic Tokyo earthquake, atop a ruined building, with the lights turned out, and ironically titled ‘The Western World’. And it is here that Laney, Blackwell and Arleigh sit down with half a dozen Japanese minders and finally meet Rez himself and, even more impressively, his hologram girlfriend, THE idoru of the title.

The descriptions of virtual reality are more frequent and vivid in this than the previous novel and now we discover that a particularly disconcerting aspect of the idoru is that, when Laney looks at it, just looks, he feels like he’s falling into a vast bottomless pit of pure information: the idoru has a hypnotic, vertigo-inducing effect on the digitally sensitive like Laney. THis is weird and strange and imaginatively persuasive.

Back to Chia and Masahiko in the love hotel. Chia is plugged into the net and we get more super-vivid descriptions of Chia moving through a number of virtual realities, including Masahiko’s room, Zona Rosa’s huge desert landscape, then back to the Venice which is her own personal playground. But she senses something is wrong and when she takes off the eyephones, discovers Maryalice sitting on the bed pointing a gun at her. Oops. They’ve tracked her down.

Cut back to the party at the ‘Western World’ nightclub. Laney goes for a pee, sees a hulk he thinks must be Russian mafia combing his hair in the men’s loo, and has only just returned to the dining room when all the lights go out, there’s screaming, people are knocked over, Laney falls down, is picked up by a member of Lo/Rez – drummer Blind Willy Jude. Jude turns out to have a handy pair of infrared goggles which he pops on and guides Laney through the stampeding crowds and broken glass to the concrete steps, down the thirteen flights of stairs back down to ground level.

On the way they collect Arleigh and Yamazaki and, as they emerge into the street to find cops surrounding the building and phoning for helicopters, they are joined by Rez. So he’s alright, hasn’t been kidnapped or anything. Arleigh gets her hands on the TV crew van and they all jump in.

Cut back to Chia in the room at the love hotel, who has a perfectly civilised conversation with Maryalice who puts down the gun – and it turns out it was a joke cigarette lighter, anyway. Maryalice lights a cigarette, rustles around in the fridge looking for margarita and explains what she got Chia to smuggle through customs in her bag for Eddie.

It is a ‘nanotech assembler’, the thing they program to make all the nanotech skyscrapers sprouting up all over earthquake-damaged Tokyo. To be precise, it is a ‘Rodel-van Erp primary molecular programming module C/7a’ (page 211).

Usually, these things are tightly controlled, but Eddie bought this one and wanted it smuggled into Tokyo so he can sell it to the Russian Kombinat. Chia realises this is the thing in the carrybag she’s been toting all over Tokyo and begs Maryalice to take it please – but Maryalice says it’s too late, the Russians are coming for it and Eddie will stand back and let them kill everyone who knows about it. Sorry, babes.

Meanwhile, Arleigh is still driving the crew van with the guys who escaped from the fight at the Western World. She takes them back to the hotel where she and Laney are staying. Laney, Arleigh, Rez, Yamazaki go to her room and wait for Blackwell to arrive, which he soon does, telling Rez he’s dumb to marry a hologram, but Rez insists she is the future. Exhausted, Laney slips out their room and slopes off to his one, opens it only to discover… bloody Kathy Torrance from Slitscan TV sitting at the end of his bed watching a porno. What the devil is she doing in Tokyo?

Cut to Chia in the love hotel, where she and Masahiko jack into cyberspace and meet people from ‘the Walled City’ which turns out to be a community of very advanced hackers. One, ‘the Etruscan’, gets money for Chia from her father’s secret bank account.

Zona arrives (online). Chia reveals to all of them what she hadn’t so far mentioned, namely that she has this contraband in her bag. Masahiko whips out the nanotech assembler, scans it and confirms that it is the latest version of nanotech assembler, very illegal, automatic life sentence for all of them.

There follows a detailed explanation of the origin of ‘the Walled City’ as a place whose denizens wanted to preserve the freedom and anarchy of the original internet before governments started putting up restrictions, ‘an outlaw place’ (page 221). The descriptions of Chia floating through random surreal hyperspace, and investigating the canyons and rooftops of the Walled City are brilliantly evocative.

Cut back to Laney in his hotel room. Kathy Torrance explains that Slitscan TV have cut and spliced Laney’s face onto the body in the porno, which is of a man who appears to be raping a girl. She says they’ll make it public and also publicise the notion that the 5-SB drug made him a psychotic stalker i.e. destroy his reputation, unless he agrees to spy on Rez for Out of Control. He’s trapped.

Cut back to Chia in cyberspace. Zona, with typical aggression, tells Masahiko and Gomi Boy they must attack, also mentions she’s sensed some intruder in her desertworld. Chia says she also has glimpsed the same in Venice, and takes them all into her Venice recreation. She sees her Music Man walking towards them, but then the Venice scenery slowly gets blanked out with snow and they see that the figure walking towards them is… the idoru!

Cut back to Laney in his hotel room with blackmailer Kathy Torrance. Yamazaki phones him repeatedly from down in the car park, they’ve got things set up for him to go into cyberspace and explore Rez’s files with the addition of the fandom data, hundreds of thousands of teen girl thoughts, ideas, observations.

Laney tells Kathy he’ll think about her offer but she says there’s nothing to think about. So, deeply troubled, Laney catches the lift down to the car park, limps to the van where the techies are fixing things up, jacks into cyberspace and… encounters the idoru.

She was there before him. She shows him a small gig Lo/Rez did when Rez lectured the audience about ‘new modes of being‘. This phrase has been repeated several times throughout the novel, it is a leitmotif.

Cut back to Chia, as she talks to the idoru in Venice while Zona sulks. (It’s a joke among the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fanclub that Zona Rosa, based in Mexico City, is wildly aggressive, but Chia has told her to shut up and so she shrinks to the size of a burping frog.) All this is weird and brilliantly described and jogging along nicely when someone takes Chia’s eyephones off and she discovers that Eddie the scary crim has got into the love hotel room. He stuns Masahiko with a stun gun, then turns and asks her, ‘Where is it?’

Cut back to Laney in the car in the underground car park. He has only just starting exploring cyberspace with the idoru when he is tapped on the shoulder by Yamazaki, removes his eyephones and is introduced to Michio Kuwayama, Chief Executive Officer of Famous Aspect corporation, who developed the idoru program.

Kuwayama invites Laney into his Land Rover in the car park, close the doors so the others can’t overhear and the idoru appears between them, a shimmering phantom. The idoru explains that she is already united with Rez, they are becoming a new mode of being. Kuwayama-san explains that this is about Futurity, they are creating futurity.

Cut back to Chia in the hotel bedroom with Eddie and an evil Russian named Yevgeny. From their conversation we learn that the Russian mafia guys knew that the teenage girl who Maryalice picked up on the plane and used as a mule (Chia) was involved with some rock band, so they’d only gone along to the party at the Western World to find out more. It certainly wasn’t some sinister kidnap plot, as Blackwell had feared, and they hadn’t expected it to turn into a huge fight and incident. As a result of all this confusion Yevgeny doesn’t trust Eddie at all.

In the middle of all this exposition, Maryalice (who had been passed out on the bed, having drunk the hotel fridge’s entire supply of miniatures) sways up off the bed gripping her little toy gun, pointing at Eddie who thinks it’s real and forcing him and the Russian back into the bathroom.

But Maryalice makes the mistake of firing it and, since it is a toy, all that happens is a little cigarette lighter flame comes out – at which point Eddie goes ballistic and grabs her and starts hitting her. So Chia grabs the stun gun Eddie had used on Masahiko and stuns him, with the result that both Eddie and Maryalice start shaking with electric shock.

Masahiko had slammed the bathroom door on the Russian, but the latter is very strong and starts to turn the metal doorhandle, so Masahiko lets go and Chia zaps the doorhandle with the stun gun, too. Very exciting fast action!

Masahiko and Chia are debating what to do when the doorknob turns again and the Russian emerges, having used one of the rubber vagina sex toys stored in the bathroom to insulate his hand (incongruous comedy). Just as he steps menacingly towards the two kids, the main door opens and Blackwell arrives, accompanied – to Chia’s delight – by Rez himself! Blackwell takes out his trademark tomahawk (the one he murdered the Italian kidnappers in prison with and has carried ever since) and we suspect the Russian is not long for this world.

But what follows is not the massacre gunfight you might have expected, but a civilised negotiation. All sides establish that the thing in Chia’s bag is the nanotech assembler. The Russian reluctantly admits his people were hoping to use it for expensive buildings and factory creation in Russia. Blackwell tells Rez not to believe it, that they only want to build drug factories.

But at this point there is a surreal development. The characters inside the room become aware that someone has announced on social media that Rez has died in the love hotel and has told all Tokyo’s teen nymphet Lo/Rez fans to go and pay tribute, light candles and hold a vigil. Looking out the window Blackwell et al see it’s true. There’s now a vast concourse of teenage girls outside the hotel and growing by the minute.

At the self-same moment, Laney, plugged into cyberspace from the car park of his hotel gets the same message. He tears off his eyephones and yells to Arleigh that they must drive to the Hotel Di as quickly as possible, so Arleigh yells at the other techs and team members to guard all the kit and she and Laney set off on an exciting high-speed drive across Tokyo.

What had happened is that Zona, back in Mexico but tuned into the cybercall with Chia, so that when Eddie tore off Chia’s eyephones the call continued and Zona saw everything that happened. Zona was previously legendary for her high cybersecurity and had kept her identity totally secret but, seeing her friends in big trouble, she had taken the risk of revealing her identity by contacting the Tokyo branch of the Lo/Rez fanclub and telling them (the fiction) that Rez had died, and to organise the vigil, and then broadcast it to as many people as she could reach.

Hence the crowds of pubescent girls assembling outside the hotel which are becoming such a public nuisance that everyone learns that police helicopters and cop cars are on the way.

At this point all parties in the hotel room realise there’s no way they can have any kind of fight and get away with it, so Blackwell and the Russian in a surly truce, Rez and Chia and Masahiko, take the elevator to the car park just as Arleigh arrives in the crew van. They all climb aboard and then drive carefully through the hordes of weeping Japanese teenage girls, get free of them and hack it back to the hotel.

Coda

And that is the end of the main plot. That’s the story. The last few chapters are brief and tie up loose ends:

Laney confesses to Blackwell that he’s being blackmailed by Kathy Torrance, so Blackwell says ‘Leave it to me, I will have a very personal conversation with her’. Among other things we have learned during the course of the book that two of Blackwell’s techniques involve a) nailing people’s hands to the bar or table b) chopping their toes off one by one. Seems probable he won’t actually have to do that to terrify Kathy so much that she drops the blackmail attempt.

So Laney is in the clear, he has fulfilled his job and a one-page chapter finds him in bed with Arleigh, they’ve clearly had sex, they’re an item and later that night he phones Rydell, who tipped him off about this whole job in the first place, to tell him everything turned out just fine.

Chia has the longest chapter. Rez pays for her to fly back to Seattle first class and we have a fairly lengthy look into her mind and feelings and see her maturing, growing up, realising the reality of her pop star crush is very different from her fantasy. On one level, the novel could almost be interpreted as a teenage girl’s ‘coming of age’ story.

The most problematic thing about the ending is the marriage of Rez and the idoru. I haven’t managed to bring it out so far, but in the later phases of the book there were references to the way Rez believed the nanotech assembler could facilitate his marriage to the idoru. That this would happen somehow via the creation of shiny new high-rise buildings out in Tokyo Bay.

I’ve read this passage several times and I remain mystified what this actually means in practice. It feels very like a kind of imaginative sleight-of-hand whereby Gibson evades any sort of logical ending and gives us this semi-mystical one except that, unlike the conclusions of all three Sprawl trilogy novels, is not so much mind-blowing as just puzzling.

Worldview details

Gibson supplies hundreds of vividly imagined, incidental details which contribute to the sense of a totally convincing futureworld, including:

  • overnight there are rumours of rocket attacks and chemical weapons in the former Financial District, doesn’t bother any of the characters, suggesting they live in a semi warzone (page 51)
  • fridges talk, tell you what’s inside them and to close the damn door (page 53)
  • logging into the virtual world to contact friends or whoever is called ‘porting’ – ‘I have to port’ (page 75) because you plug into a ‘dataport’ (page 77)
  • a revolutionary new technology of nanobuildings which literally build themselves by tiny elements of the building intelligently replicating, like watching a candle burn but in reverse – ‘They are like Giger paintings of New York’ (page 81) watching them ripple and move makes Laney feel queasy
  • toilets flush then disinfect themselves with UV light (page 78)
  • elevators talk, well, you tell them where you want to go (page 78)
  • Chia’s phone uses GPS to locate people she’s calling (page 85)
  • Masahiko interacts with the Walled City program via a slender rectangle, much like a modern tablet
  • ‘meshbacks’ is a general term for what we call chavs
  • cigarettes are banned in America and the authorities have gone back through movies and digitally erased them (page 156)
  • the Kombinat seems to be the name of the government in Russia which is actually a mafia government (page 157)
  • cars drive on gasohol, leaving an oddly sweet polluting smell behind

Cyberpunk prose

Gibson writes highly finished, stylised, jazzy, jive prose, no doubt about that – he takes the hard-boiled prose style of the 1940s noir writers, Hammett and Chandler, itself subsequently pared down and refined by generations of American airport thriller writers, and then mixes it with his own highly distinctive combination of high tech jargon and low-life street life. Imagined tech is mashed up with multimedia imagery, skyscraper and 4-by-4 consumer products, neon signs, shiny chrome hotel rooms, black Range Rovers; the text keeps presenting vivid contrasts between the precise spec of high-end, shiny products and streets full of broken glass from the great earthquake, patrolled by hoods and skaterpunks.

It’s a dazzling mix which Gibson handles with extraordinary verve and confidence, creating hundreds of examples of vivid, chrome poetry.

The rain was running and pooling, tugging reflected neon out of the perpendicular and spreading it in wriggly lines across sidewalk and pavement. (page 161)

Blackwell thunked the door behind him, then opened the front, should’ve-been driver’s side door and seemed to pour himself into the car, a movement that simultaneously suggested the sliding of a ball of mercury and the settling of hundreds of pounds of liquid concrete. (page 161)

‘Who owns the building?’ Laney asked, watching Blackwell float up the stairs in front of them, his arms, in the matte black sleeves of the drover’s car, like sides of beef dressed for a funeral. (page 164)

Here is a description of Chia’s first shadowy encounter with ‘the Walled City’ in cyberspace, which brilliantly conveys Gibson’s vision of it as shifting shapes and images, more sensed than ‘seen’:

Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. It wasn’t even like porting. Software conflict? Faint impressions of light through a fluttering of rags. And then the thing before her: building or biomass or cliff face looming there, in countless unplanned strata, nothing about it even or regular. Accreted patchwork of shallow random balconies, thousands of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles of fog. Stretching either way to the periphery of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a black fur of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth of cable. And past this scribbled border a sky where colours crawled like gasoline on water. (page 182)

Gibson can write this kind of thing by the mile and I find it beguiling and entrancing – he creates real electronic dreams.

He uses another characteristic effect – the pregnant pause, the ominous intimation, the hint that something momentous is hovering just out of range of eye and mind which recurs again and again in Gibson’s novels, giving them a constant sense of mystery and threat:

Between stations there was a grey shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial rate, just prior to the emergence of a new order of being. (page 137)

Reservations

Fiction about and for teens?

Although it’s about other things as well, the weight of the novel feels dominated by the story of a teenage fan of a famous rock band. The amount of time Gibson devotes to describing the Seattle club of teenage girl fans and the Japanese fan club, and then the way the novel climaxes with all those teenage girls crowding round the Hotel Di… it felt like they… It helped to make it feel like Idoru is, at bottom, a book for teenagers or young adults.

Embarrassed teenage attitude towards sex

This sense of it not quite being a book for adults crystallises in the couple of chapters featuring sex. When Chia and Masahiko explore the ‘love hotel’ room, her discovery of the various rubber sex aids is played for laughs. ‘Yuk,’ she says, wrinkling up her nose at the rubber vaginas or extra-large dildos. So the reader sees adult sex urges and aids through this young teenager’s basically virginal, innocent eyes.

This makes the short scene right at the end which finds Laney in bed with Arleigh feel strangely… out of place. Grown-up sex somehow doesn’t fit into this book. The narrative is much more at home with made-up rock bands and their teenybopper fan clubs, taking us to bars with silly theme bars (the Kafka-themed bar, the bar plastered with bubblegum brands, the ‘Western World’ bar, notable for having a large plastic replica tank in the middle of the dance floor, and so on).

Teenage environments

It’s a book of noisy amusement arcades, skateboard gangs, cheesy TV shows, nerdy teenagers obsessed with computer games and gadgets, who show off by smoking (banned) cigarettes. Even the main adult character, Laney, is himself immature, naively impressed by swanky hotels and shiny cars, impressed in the way a gawky teenager would be.

Dated rock music

Another issue is Gibson’s taste in music. His novels feature rock bands with silly names like Chrome Koran (isn’t that a terrible name?) or Dukes of Nuke ‘Em (a ‘hideous ‘roidhead metal band’).

But it’s not that these are silly names, it’s that the entire idea of ‘rock’ music seems rather retro nowadays, in 2021, a time of female singers (Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Adele) and rap artists from Kanye West to Stormzy. Gibson’s obsession with rock bands feels a bit dated.

Digging deeper into this theme, there are references to:

  • Chia’s Music Master hologram being modelled on David Bowie (he’s not actually named but there’s a reference to his unmatching eyes, which is a famous Bowie factoid)
  • the way this hologram refers to the Procol Harum song Whiter Shade of Pale (1967)
  • the way Rez is referred to in a BBC music documentary as ‘the next Hendrix’ (p.131)

All these old references remind the reader that the third novel in the Bridge trilogy is named All Tomorrow’s Parties after the Velvet Underground song sung by Nico and released way back in 1967.

Hendrix, Procol Harum, Nico. They’re all from over half a century ago. That’s old, in fact it’s Dad Rock. So it’s a paradox that Gibson, who made a reputation for inventing the cyberfuture before it happened is, in this central respect, a central theme to all his later novels, so deeply conservative.

The odd centrality of old-world television

The numerous descriptions of what Laney and Chia see when they jack into cyberspace are genuinely visionary, beautiful and compelling. But back out in the real world (when they’re not jacked in) it’s an oddity that a key element in the plot is, surprisingly, Television.

Some people might find the satire about TV programmes which make a living dishing the dirt on celebrities, and then another TV programme which makes a living dishing the dirt on programmes which dish the dirt on celebrities, amusing and witty satire. But taking the mickey out of TV for being mostly trash feels very dated to me, reminds me of those Clive James TV shows from the 1980s which took the mickey out of Japanese TV, and the scores of programmes which have copied this simple idea.

Nonetheless, television companies and programmes are a surprisingly big component of many of Gibson’s books.

Thus the previous novel, Virtual Light, opens with Rydell being taken up by a reality TV show and the climax of that book relies on the fact that Rydell is again taken up and his story told by the same TV show – Cops in Trouble – whose lawyers spring him and his beautiful assistant, Chevette, from gaol, make them sign exclusive contracts, and make them media stars for a few weeks.

Similarly, in this novel, the central theme of the opening hundred pages is Laney’s experience working for another reality TV show company, Slitscreen, complete with a supposed exposé of its trashy, exploitative values.

My point is that this is all very old media. Rock bands and television, Hollywood producers and lawyers. I know a whole load of futuristic details have been bolted onto it, and I know a key element in the novel is the repeated and brilliant evocations of cyberspace, and yet… somehow, the core vibe feels very nineteen seventies.

A teenage coming-of-age novel?

In the end, the marriage of idoru and Rez doesn’t really come off. I read the last passage a couple of times, but still didn’t understand how they were being united in what was basically a property development project. Here’s Chia reflecting on her experiences:

But mainly it was the City taking up her time, because Rez and [the idoru] were there, shadows among the other shadows but still you could tell. Working on their Project. Plenty there who didn’t like the idea, but plenty who did. The Etruscan did. He said it was the craziest thing since they’d turned the first killfile inside out. Sometimes Chia wondered if they all weren’t just joking, because it just seemed impossible that anyone could ever do that. Build that, on an island in Tokyo Bay. But the idoru said that that was where they wanted to live, now that they were married. So they were going to do it. (pages 291 to 292)

All the way through, characters including Rez refer optimistically to ‘new modes of being’ and Rez refers to his partnering the idoru as an ‘alchemical marriage’, but when it comes down to it, in these last pages, Gibson fails to give us any sense at all of what that actually means.

Whereas the absolute final chapter, an extended reflection on Chia’s feelings once she’s safely back home after her Big Adventure, is much more effective at somehow encapsulating the book’s essential adolescence.

It is fitting that the novel ends not with the evanescent idoru concept but with the much more solid and traditional trope of Chia, the adolescent girl, feeling she’s grown up a bit now and is no longer so in thrall to the Lo/Rez mystique, having seen the reality of his life, of adult life.

This final chapter helps crystallise your sense that the novel is less ‘a vision of a dystopian future’ (as the blurb on the back puts it) and far more a rather sweet, teenage girl’s ‘coming of age’ story.

Credit

Idoru by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1996. All references are to the 1997 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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Posted by Simon on April 14, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/14/idoru-william-gibson/

Virtual Light by William Gibson (1993)

Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande. (Virtual Light, page 182)

The Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s prose

Gibson is a science fiction author but incorporates a good deal of noir, pulp, thriller and other genre tropes as well as, occasionally, rising to genuinely ‘literary’ complexity of psychological affect. I just read Michael Crichton’s debut novel, The Andromeda Strain, and that has a very straightforward plot, a thriller mapped out across five days, written in extremely clear and lucid prose, written so a 9-year-old could understand it. There are occasional demanding passages describing scientific theories around biology, extra-terrestrial life and so on, but these also are written with the clarity of a school textbook. Clarity is the aim.

Gibson by contrast, is noted for the cool, streetwise, technologically savvy and drug-wired prose style which he invented for his so-called Sprawl trilogy – being Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

All three of those novels concern ‘street’ people, hustlers, living among the shanties and hi-tech canyons of a futuristic society, living lives full of violence and drugs, and in all three these hustlers are slowly introduced to the higher levels of society, to the professional middle classes, then to billionaires, and so take us on a journey of discovery to uncover the real workings of their post-war society (the Sprawl trilogy is set 50 or 60 years in the future, after World War III).

Another feature of all three Sprawl novels is you’re never really sure what is going on – even when I reached the semi-apocalyptic endings of all three novels, I wasn’t completely sure what had just happened. Since I felt the same about his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which also rises to a kind of visionary apocalyptic climax, I concluded that this is a consistent element of Gibson’s approach: that key aspects of the narrative are kept mysterious, giving you the feeling of something ungraspable, just out of reach.

This is one way in which his books might be said to be ‘literary’, in a way the utterly obvious and unmysterious Crichton never is. Everything is explained in Crichton; big important things are not explained, in Gibson.

The Bridge trilogy

Virtual Light is the first of what developed into a new set of three novels, the Bridge Trilogy. How are the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies different? Well, the Sprawl stories were set about fifty years in the future, in around 2035 (they were written in the 1980s), after World War III, when everyone has access to advanced digital technology, and hackers make a living ‘jacking into’ cyberspace in order to carry out hit and run raids against the vast data icebergs of the future corporations which run everything.

The Bridge Trilogy is set in the future, but not so far into the future nor in so different a society. To be precise, it is set only ten years or so after the first novel was published – in what was then the ‘future’ of 2006.

There have still been society-changing events: a mega earthquake (which seems to be named Little Grande) has divided California into NoCal and SoCal (first mentioned page 8) resulting in a steady stream of new volcanoes up in Washington state (p.32). The President is a black woman (p.9), the air is toxic from all the polluting vehicles, skin cancer is a problem, everyone wears a lot of suntan cream (p.14) (see a full list of characteristics of the Bridge world, below).

Why is it called the Bridge trilogy? Because a central feature is that San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge broke during the earthquake, and has been transformed by homeless survivors into a huge, futuristic shantytown. For some of the old-timers who ‘colonised’ it, like Skinner, it’s a place to end their days, but for others like the fresh young heroine of the book, Chevette, it’s all they’ve ever known.

She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the [concrete] slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams. (p.122)

Given that the trilogy is named after the bridge, it’s notable that the bridge, as such, doesn’t feature that much in the plot, although it is woven in as a key setting, being the temporary home of Chevette and featuring the scene where a bounty hunter comes looking for her there.

The word ‘bridge’ possibly also has a metaphorical sense in that the entire trilogy is a ‘bridge’ from the present (well, the 1990s when Gibson wrote them) to the hyper-digital future envisioned in the Sprawl trilogy of the 2030s and ’40s.

All manner of cool references are slipped into the text about this cool future, which combines a maximum of stoner, drug, derelict street savvy with the highly-armed, gun expertise of Judge Dredd. Thus there is a lot of talk about Glock machine guns, knives, flick-knives, stunguns, SWAT stun grenades and many more weapons. This is meant to be a semi-dystopian future but a) the fact that it is set in what is now our past and b) its obsession with guns, just reinforces my sense of what a screwed-up, hyper-violent society America is, now.

The cool gun expertise alternates with cool references to a new designer drug, ‘dancer’.

Seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and therefore were both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic. (p.9)

From the get-go Gibson is master of a street savvy, whip-smart, post-Beat prose. Here’s a paragraph from the first page:

The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night. (page 1)

A lot is going on here, but to pick three obvious points:

  1. It’s poetic prose, designed to be savoured and reread for its sound alone.
  2. ‘The sewage flats’? This is the one and only time they’re mentioned in the book so they take their place alongside hundreds of other details which are thrown away, unexplained, and from which the reader uses their imagination to construct the functioning and appearance of this futureworld (see the list below).
  3. ‘lodged in the lens of night’ is a self-consciously poetic and imaginative image. The book is full of them. It is a self-consciously stylish book, on all levels (in its prose style and setting and characters and plot).

Cops

However, having said all this about Gibson’s zippy prose style and slick future-vision, the reader quite quickly realises the novel is about a cop, Berry Rydell, who’s become a kind of private security guard. An American novel about a cop-turned private detective? Actually this is a very old trope, going back to the noir novels of the 1930s and 40s, to Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler…

And then, as the novel progresses, we watch as this tough private eye rescues the attractive young woman from the bad guys and whisks her off to safety while he tries to figure out the Right Thing To Do.

Hmmm, in this elementary respect, the basic plot structure of Virtual Light seems far from experimental or new – it is, to some extent, a cyberspace update of film noir tropes and characters and plot.

So: we learn that Berry Rydell, born 1983 (p.14) is an ex-cop from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was cashiered out of the service after shooting to pieces a drug-addled maniac who was holding his wife and kids hostage and demanding to speak to the president. He’s managed to get a job with a private security firm named IntenSecure in Los Angeles, alongside a ripe collection of freaks and allergy monkeys… Here’s a plot summary:

Plot summary

Berry Rydell is fired from the Tennessee police force for shooting a hostage-taker, the demented Kenneth Turvey.

Rydell is in his twenties looks like Tommy Lee Jones (p.81) i.e. ruggedly handsome.

The notoriety Rydell wins from shooting Turvey and being sacked leads to him briefly being taken up by the sexy presenter of a TV show, Cops With Problems, Karen Mendelson (p.16) who flies Rydell out to LA and up to her swank penthouse apartment for a few weeks of expense account living and wild sex, before a new and better story comes along, she dumps him and has him escorted from the apartment by security guards who work for IntenSecurity Corporation, a ‘rentacop’ outfit.

That’s what gives Rydell the idea of applying for a job there. He gets one driving a vast 6-wheel ‘Hotspur Hussar’ around the houses of the rich up in Benedict Canyon who’ve paid for security checks (to be precise, he is employed in ‘the residential armed-response branch’ of the IntenSecurity Corporation p.48), alongside a skinny streak of piss named Sublett, who grew up in a trailer park dominated by his born-again Christian mother, watching old movies and harangued all day by TV evangelists.

One evening Rydell and Sublett follow instructions beamed from ‘the Death Star’, the nickname they give to the Southern Californian Geosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite (p.11).

But it’s a hoax; someone has hacked into the system in order to make Rydell think a robbery and hostage situation is taking place at some luxury home. So Rydell rams the huge truck through the house’s security gate, across the Japanese garden and through the living room wall, and is staggering into the house with his machine gun when… an LAPD helicopter descends over the wreckage and arrests him; the children were off with their father somewhere; there was no hostage situation; the wife was having kinky sex (PVC and handcuffs) with the Polish gardener. As a result she sues IntenSecurity for physical and emotional damages, and they suspend Rydell from all duties: it’s another screw-up.

Cut to San Francisco. Here Chevette-Marie Washington (p.120), who long ago escaped from a juvenile detention centre outside Beaverton (p.125), is a bicycle courier. After making a drop (or ‘pull a tag’ as they seem to call it) at the Hotel Morrisey, she bumps into a drunk in the elevator who takes her up to a party hosted by someone called Cody Harwood, where she spends 15 minutes feeling seriously out of place, gets hit on a by a slimeball with a wet cigar then, on the way out, pushed up against the slimeball by the dense crowd while his attention is distracted talking to a hooker, something is sticking out his pocket and so, on impulse, Chevette nicks it, and is out the apartment door and over to a service elevator, down to the car park, unlocks her bike and is off into the city within minutes…

This turns out to be the core of the plot. Without realising it, Chevette has stolen a very expensive pair of sunglasses. Why? Because they are Virtual Light shades, see below.

Chevette lives high up on the Golden Gate Bridge with a broken-down old man named Skinner in a shack he’s built high up amid the cabling. In the years since the earthquake, thousands of homeless people have constructed a shanty town in the sky, building home-made apartments which have slowly crept up the struts and along the cables of the old bridge till it looks like a giant crustacean, covered with Gothic excrescences.

Skinner is regularly visited by Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist who is writing a study of how the bridge was colonised and so interviews Skinner because he was one of the ‘pioneers’ of its settlement. T, this being a handy prompt for a series of flashbacks or retellings from Skinner of how it all happened. Yamazaki is not, however, an impressive or powerful figure;  when we see Yamazaki from Chevette’s viewpoint, he is ‘the Japanese nerd… the college boy or social worker’ who always looks lost.

LA Back in Los Angeles, Rydell – having been suspended from work by IntenSecurity – is told by his immediate boss Juanito Hernandez about a job opportunity, working for a freelance security operative, Lucius Warbaby, up in San Francisco. Rydell needs a job so he flies economy up to Frisco sitting next to a sweet old lady who goes on about having to arrange for her husband’s brain, which is in cryogenic storage, to be moved to a better facility. The wacky old future, eh.

Rydell is met at the airport by huge black Lucius Warbaby and his gofer, Freddie (both described on page 80). Freddie’s loud shirt is covered with images of guns, Warbaby has a brace on one leg and walks with a cane. He is the size of a refrigerator but stylish and dignified.

San Francisco Chevette works for Allied Couriers. She’s called in for a grilling by her boss, Bunny Malatesta (p.94) who asks why she checked in to Hotel Morrissey security (on the job where she strayed into the party) but never checked out. The hotel is following it up because the heat is on about the missing shades. In fact, Bunny tells her, the heat is turned up because the owner of the shades has been murdered.

In the next scene Rydell is with Warbaby when he meets two SF homicide cops who are investigating the self-same murder, of Hans Rutger Blix (p.102). The cops are Russians, Svobodov and Orlonsky. Warbaby is a big man but precise and punctilious and polite; he has beautiful handwriting (p.163). He reminds me a bit of the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon.

Chevette’s courier colleague, a beautiful black man named Samuel Saladin DuPree (p.129), or Sammy Sal, gets her to admit to stealing the shades. She shows them to him and he explains that the shades are Virtual Light sunglasses (p.113). They interact directly with the optical nerve without needing actual light. Sammy explains they’re fairly common among professionals, like a hologram.

In fact Warbaby has a pair which he uses when he takes Freddie and Rydell to the crime scene – the hotel room where Blix was murdered – and further explains that the VL shades have ‘drivers’ in the lenses and frames which affect the optic nerves directly (p.120).

Freddie takes Rydell shopping to ‘Container City’, comprised of loads of derelict cargo ships and their containers with stairways strung up and between them, very trash futuristic, maybe like the final scene in the movie I, Robot.

A character named Loveless, a hired thug, arrives at Skinner’s shack on the Bridge with a gun. Chevette is up on the roof with Sammy. Loveless doesn’t see Sammy but orders Chevette to climb down and back into Skinner’s shack. He handcuffs Skinner and Yamazaki with funky futuristic handcuffs made of flexible plastic which tighten if you struggle against them.

Loveless has come looking for the stolen shades. Chevette lies and tells him they’re in the pannier of her bicycle so he forces her down ladders towards the rigged-up lift which takes them down to road level. Here Chevette cleverly arranges for the bike’s electric defence mechanism to give Loveless an electric.

Sammy has silently followed them both down to street level and now bops Loveless on the head but not hard enough. He just has time to hand Chevette back the shades (he’d been holding them up on the roof when Loveless appeared in Skinner’s apartment) before a dazed Loveless staggers back to his feet and pumps Sammy full of lead – Sammy simply disappearing backwards between the cables off the bridge and falling to his death. Shocked, Chevette just turns and runs.

Meanwhile, Warbaby and Freddie arrive with Rydell at the base of the bridge and send him onto it to find Chevette, they being scared by exaggerated stories of its voodoo, cannibalistic inhabitants.

To ensure drama, a heavy rainstorm comes on and in the thick of it Rydell stumbles across Chevette standing in the rain. He tails her as she staggers along the bridge in the rainstorm and comes across her one-time boyfriend, Lowell, and his ghoulish sidekick Cody, sitting atop a container.

Rydell tails the three as they head off to a bar, humorously named Cognitive Dissidence. Rydell goes into the warm fug of the bar after them, taking a place at the bar and ordering a beer while he ponders what to do next. But into this bar suddenly arrives one of the two Russian homicide cops Warbaby had introduced him to soon after he arrived in SF, coming in huge and silent and with a drawn gun. He orders Chevette to come with him but then…all the lights go out.

In the darkness the fat lady who operates a dancing hologram which is a feature of the bar, makes it dance all round the Russian’s head, giving Rydell long enough to make it across the bar, scoop up Chevette and carry her kicking and screaming to the stairs out of the place. Unfortunately, he runs straight into the other Russian waiting at the top of the stairs who stops them. Rydell and Chevette are both disarmed and handcuffed and forced to trudge under the watchful guns of the Russians to the San Francisco end of the bridge.

Here Warbaby and Freddie, who commissioned the Russian heavies, are waiting for them. They unhandcuff Rydell and are beginning to explain what’s going on when there is another dramatic surprise: one of Chevette’s friends who we’d been very briefly introduced to a bit earlier, a big bear of a man incongruously named Nigel, seeing Chevette taken away at gunpoint, now attacks everyone on a heavyweight bike, ramming the Russian with the gun, grabbing him and banging his head against the hood of Rydell’s car.

As the others set about dealing with this Nigel, Rydell drags Chevette into his Patriot 4 x 4, kick starts it and they skid off, Warbaby raising his cane which turns out to be a concealed gun and shooting out the Patriot’s rear window, but then they’ve turned a corner and are escaping!

Chevette directs Rydell to Haight Street, where they drop the Patriot (which is promptly stolen) and hide out in a tattoo parlour, pretending to take their time in the waiting room deciding on a joint tattoo, while they calm down.

When they eventually leave the tattoo parlour, in a striking coincidence, who should stop and ask the way but the nice old lady Rydell had chatted to on the plane up here, Mrs Danica Elliott, who has hired a big white camper van to drive back to LA in. She asks Rydell if he can drive since she is completely lost. So he and Chevette get in and drive nice and slow out of town. Eventually they’re so tired they hand the driving back to Mrs Elliott and go to sleep in the bed in the back of the camper.

BUT – when they wake up the camper is stationary and Mrs Elliott is gone and who else but Loveless, the hired killer, is waiting for them! I had a sinking feeling that he might have murdered the old lady (one gets sick of all the murder and carnage in American novels) and so was relieved to discover she was herself an IntenSecurity operative put in place to tail and watch Rydell.

Loveless now proceeds to explain The PLOT. The Virtual Light shades Chevette stole contain the blueprint for the comprehensive rebuilding of shattered San Francisco by foreign investors. These are based in Costa Rica (which has been mentioned a number of times as the location for stored data in the same way Switzerland is for huge foreign bank accounts in our day).

The rebuilding project has to be handled carefully because the local Americans might object, but the core issue is that big corporations want to buy up the land the new city is going to be built on. So if the plans get out, all sorts of other actors (for example, the state) might buy it up instead. Thus the precise plans must be kept secret because inconceivably vast fortunes stand to be made or lost.

And it all comes down to possession of the shades. Blix was a courier tasked with delivering them to the right person in San Francisco, but instead let himself be distracted, getting drunk at that party and then stupidly losing them (when Chevette picked his pocket). Loveless had been tasked with shadowing Blix and when the latter lost the shades was only too happy to murder him, not just killing him but slitting his throat and pulling his tongue out to make it look like some South American drug killing.

While Loveless is talking he gets thirsty and orders Chevette to get him a drink from the camper’s fridge, nice and slow. Out of his sight, Chevette slips into Loveless’s drink an entire stash of the designer drug dancer, and hands it to him. Thus, as Loveless carries on explaining The Plot to Rydell and Chevette, he starts to sweat and hallucinate, and ends up firing his pistol manically. Rydell and Chevette throw themselves out the doors, and hide while Loveless runs off shooting wildly. Then they jump back into the camper and make off at speed.

Rydell and Chevette stop to get directions from an old-timer at a derelict Shell gas station. Rydell had used a phone they picked up in their adventures to ring the only person he trusts, Sublett, who we met back at the start of the story – only to discover Sublett has quit his job at IntenSecurity and gone home to his mother’s trailer on a wacky Christian base camp. Looking at the map Rydell realises it’s fairly close by, so Rydell and Chevette drive there and bluff their way in by pretending to be extreme born-again Christians.

There follows extended satire about TV evangelists, in this instance a fictional one named the Reverend Fallon. This actually feels quite old now, very 1980s. No-one cares about TV evangelists any more, compared to the power of the internet, social media, Facebook, the Russians and President Trump.

Rydell devises A Cunning Plan. First he calls Chevette’s ex, Lowell, and puts the frighteners on him to get him to give them access to the digital online place known as ‘the Republic of Desire’. Then he ascertains that one of Sublett’s nerdy friends in the born-again caravan park, Buddy, has a set of eyephones. He pays Buddy to use them, then Chevette watches as Rydell puts them on and dials into early cyberspace.

Rydell has got details of how to dial into the Republic of Desire and here, in cyberspace, sees three weird figures, a woman made of TV shows, a man mountain and a kind of Tyrannosaurus Rex with human hands. These three entities instantly access Rydell’s records and read everything about his life and history, are bored and are leaving the call when Rydell asks them whether any of them lives in San Francisco and likes it the way it is. This gets their attention and Rydell goes on to explain how the plans stored on the Virtual Light sunglasses reveal how San Francisco is going to be handed over to foreign developers and changed out of all recognition. That gets the three digital warriors’ attention.

Together they cook up a plan which dominates the last thirty pages of the novel, which feels like a scam or heist in the style of Ocean’s 11.

Chevette dresses as a courier and enters Century City II, the luxury condo where Rydell had briefly lived with top lawyer Karen Mendelson when they had their brief affair. Soon as Karen Mendelson opens her apartment door, Sublett pushes her and Chevette back into her apartment.

Meanwhile Rydell has recruited the three hackers in the Republic of Desire to help him. The man mountain figure refers to himself as the God-Eater, but they could be anyone, anywhere, Rydell reflects ruefully. Rydell makes his way to Century City II, where he’s arranged to meet Warbaby at 3pm. He watches Warbaby and Freddie and the two Russian hoods (the Bad Guys) arrive in two separate cars, then enter the mall. He follows them up inside, then phones the three hackers in the Republic of Desire again. The narrative explains that they decided to ‘help’ because they don’t want to see San Francisco over-developed and also it presented a new technical challenge, which amuses them.

What happens is: the hackers take control of SF police in order to fly armed drones into the mall which tell Warbaby, Freddie and the Russians to get on their faces. This is because the system has been hacked to identify them of being terrorists planning to blow up the entire mall.

But where’s their hired goon, Loveless? Seeing he hasn’t come along with Warbaby, Rydall guesses he must have gone straight to Karen’s apartment. Rydell dashes up there and arrives just in time, just at the split second Loveless emerges from hiding and raises his little gun to Chevette’s temple planning to take her hostage or just to shoot her. And that’s the moment Rydell hits him with the capsicum spray he carries round with him like mace gas only much worse.

Epilogue

Then – The Payoff. The cops arrest the five baddies, Warbaby, Freddie, the two Russian hoods and Loveless. Then a whole fleet of Karen Mendelson’s lawyer friends arrive, including the legendary lawyer Wellington Ma, and these media operators immediately see the TV potential of the story and so sign up Chevette and Sublett to tell their stories. While Chevette had been in the apartment with Karen she’d shown her how to play the Virtual Shades, so Karen has seen the development scams which were planned and is able to retell it to her lawyers and the cops. Rydell et al are in the clear, and a good TV show will be made about it all, and the baddies will be brought down. Rydell et al will be arrested but the head lawyer from Cops in Trouble tells him they’ll get bail within the hour and then they can start working on the documentary and then the made-for-TV movie.

In other words – despite the futuristic sci-fi trappings – this feels, in the end, like an American crime caper: the goody is a cop with a heart of the gold, the young girl assistant has nice ‘tits’ (as Rydell puts it, more than once) the baddies are crooked property developers, foreigners and blacks – and everything will be sorted out by shit-hot LA TV lawyers.

Ultimately, feels more like an episode of LA Law than genuine science fiction.

Features of Gibson’s futureworld of 2006

  • the President is a woman named Millband (p.17) and is black! (p.183)
  • there’s a vaccination against AIDS (p.18) seems you need certificates of vaccination to show partners before having sex (p.21), the origin of the vaccine is just one individual, J.D. Shapely, who was found to host a benign version of HIV which eradicated the malign version (see below)
  • cops wear air-conditioned helmets with plastic visors
  • ‘gyms’ offer injections of Brazilian fetal matter and having your skeleton ‘reinforced’
  • Italy is no longer a unified state, people come from parts of ‘what used to be Italy’ (p.40) (cf Canada, below)
  • Chevette’s motorbike has a recognition loop you slip your hand into to unlock it (p.44)
  • swimwear is designed to keep off dangerous UV rays and to keep out the dangerous poisons in the sea
  • the ozone hole is a problem (p.46)
  • a virus has destroyed palm trees (maybe all trees) (p.50), later identified as ‘some Mexican virus’ (p.273)
  • five dollar coins, suggesting inflation (p.58)
  • Thomasson is a generic name Gibson’s invented for pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape (p.61)
  • the big nations of the world (Russia, Canada, Brazil) have fragmented into numerous mini-states (p.71), Canada has broken up into five states (p.242)
  • the Cease Upon The Midnight movement and other self-help euthanasia groups prefer peaceful suicide to having your brain put in a cryogenic store (p.79)
  • it’s been illegal to manufacture cigarettes in the US since 2000 (p.101)
  • the Sword of the Pig movement (p.108)
  • after the earthquake there seem to have been waves of disease or ‘plagues’, which Gibson lists on page 117
  • New Zealand appears to have been occupied by Japanese armed forces who have to suppress resistance movements (p.190)
  • much is made throughout the book of posters and image of AIDS survivor J.D. Shapely dotted around San Francisco and, at one point, Yamazaki channel surfs to a BBC documentary which gives an extremely thorough biography of Shapely (pages 190 to 192). Shapely was a gay prostitute who ended up in prison where they discovered he had AIDS but it didn’t kill him; in him HIV had mutated to a strain which was a) benign b) ate the original virulent strain. Thus a vaccine was made from his version and was administered to everyone in the world.

Funky phrases

So rich in slang and neologisms, American writers.

  • inner trivia banks (p.14)
  • telepresence rig (p.15)
  • Thiobuscaline (3,5-dimethoxy-4-butylthiophenethylamine) – a lesser-known psychedelic drug (p.16)
  • bunny down (p.75)

Conclusion

My opening comments reflected my memories of the Sprawl trilogy and Gibson’s place in science fiction. As I read on into this novel I came to realise it is far less a science fiction book than a techno update of the long lineage of noir cop crime thrillers; that Gibson’s hard-nosed cop with a heart of gold has more in common with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, or Deckard in the movie Blade Runner or John McClane in the Die Hard franchise than with more standard science fiction; i.e. that Rydell is an avatar of a very familiar type, the tall, handsome, strong cop or ex-cop, rough around the edges, prepared to bend the rules, but basically a good guy.

Similarly, although Chevette is a ballsy, street girl, an urchin, a reform school runaway, she, also, has a heart of gold and has to be rescued by Sir Galahad, thus fulfilling a thousand-year old stereotype. And – sigh – she, of course, starts to fall for him.

  • She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell… she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. (p.261)
  • She was starting to really like him… (p.276)

Rydell reminds me most of Lee Child’s creation, Jack Reacher, another knight errant who combines physical prowess with basic moral rectitude (although, admittedly, Reacher didn’t make his debut till 1997, four years after this novel was published).

They all supply the reader with the same basic pleasure, which is they’re rule-breakers and naughty boys who are, at heart, good boys really. No matter how much they bend or break the law, it’s always in a good cause. And they all combine a bunch of characteristics most men wish they had – size and strength and physical prowess, expertise with guns, all kinds of practical know-how with cars and gadgets – and their basic decency wins over even the most initially independent or resistant of women.

To quote a seventy-year-old tagline, ‘Men want to be him; women want to be with him’ (James Bond memes)

In other words, the setting of the Bridge trilogy is novel and creative, and the hundreds of details Gibson works into the novel certainly convey a great fullness and plausibility to his fictional world. But the basic narrative structure is very, very old.

Nothing dates as fast as the future

One last thought: setting the novel closer to the present day, paradoxically makes it more dated. In the far future (well, the 2030s when Neuromancer is set) anything goes. But if you set something in the near future, you have to be more measured and realistic with your predictions and chances increase that whatever you predict will be wrong.

Thus some of the baddies in the book, like Warbaby, get their information via faxes; computers are used a bit but nowhere near as much as they turned out to; there are one or two remote phones but not many – in other words Gibson did not accurately predict the full impact of the great transformative agents of our time, the internet, increasingly lightweight personal computers, and mobile phones.

And his cultural references feel dated, as well. As in the Sprawl novels, many things have a strong Japanese flavour i.e. the inclusion of the Japanese character Yamazaki and repeated references to a catastrophic earthquake that’s taken place in Tokyo. But in the years since 1993, Japan has slipped out of the cool cultural and economic position Gibson gives it:

Japan’s economy has struggled with deflation since its bubble economy peaked in 1989. (Investopedia)

Japan has, since the turn of the century, in terms of culture and economy and products and even art, increasingly been replaced by China.

Also Gibson’s pop culture references have aged. The entire concept of rock music, which is referenced throughout the novel, seems old now. The character Sublett has an obsession with the movies of David Cronenberg, which might have marked him off as at the cutting edge of pop avant-garde in 1993, but not now, in 2020.

Credit

Virtual Light by William Gibson was published by Viking Press in 1993. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.

Other William Gibson reviews

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by Simon on April 12, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 12, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/virtual-light-william-gibson/