Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Did you know William Gibson is one of the most skilled authors of the 20th century?  It’s true!  “Sure,” you might say, “he did practically invent the cyberpunk genre.”  Yup, that’s pretty impressive.  He dirtied up technology, marrying the high-tech with the low-brow to create a whole world of fiction populated with cobbled-together Millenium Falcons instead of spit-shined Death Stars.  You might also note his ability to shrewdly predict the future path of technological development, resulting in almost eerie interpretations of the Internet and the dissemination of information decades before their time.  You could even harp on his fantastic sense of style — which at times reads like a sci-fi lucid dream — or how his fast-paced narratives often imply action without even having to show it.

Yeah, those would all be pretty good points.

But there’s another element of his writing, more overlooked, that deserves praise for so effectively bolstering up the stories Gibson has to tell.  I was suddenly struck by the intricacy and imagination of Gibson’s worldbuilding while reading his 1993 novel Virtual Light.  Having only read the short story “Johnny Mnemonic” and the Sprawl trilogy before Virtual Light, its slight departure from the tech-heavy cyberpunk of his earlier works was an interesting change.  Granted, Virtual Light still bears the markings of a cyberpunk dystopia, but lacks hacker heroes like Neuromancer’s Case and vivid depictions of cyberspace.  In all of his books, Gibson harnesses that knack for predicting technology’s path and uses it to build a unique world, unusually believable and more thoroughly thought-out than nearly anything else in sci-fi.

Virtual Light is no exception, only the results of Gibson’s worldbuilding are even more interesting than usual because he applies them to contemporary society.  The novel hits much closer to home, even if its near-future setting isn’t so far removed from his earlier works.  He creates a world where California has been ravaged by earthquakes and split into NoCal and SoCal (amusingly playing off the already-existing cultural differences between the two), while Japan has been similarly decimated by an Earthquake nicknamed Godzilla.  A cool setting, but hardly as amazing as the character J.D. Shapely who lurks in the shadows just outside Light’s corona.  Shapely is not a protagonist, an antagonist, a tag-along; he’s simply a memory.  But he was a man whose unique biology led to a cure for AIDS.  In 1993, AIDS was a hot-button issue, and Gibson took it upon himself to address the issue within the realm of science-fiction, creating a Martin Luther King-esque martyr for a cause that concerns every living person on the globe.

Gibson is obviously interested in exploring real social issues, extrapolating them into a future scenario and scrutinizing how they would eventually impact us all.  Shapely becomes a cult figure, worshiped by the poor, celebrated by the rich.  He weaves history, fake documentaries, and character observations of Shapely references throughout Virtual Light, none of which directly relate to the plot in the slightest.  They create such a real, powerful vision of the world that Virtual Light’s fictional society derives enormous complexity from such a tangential story element.

Like Shapely, another oft-referenced, never-seen character, Reverend Wayne Fallon, addresses a real social issue.  Fallon is an ironic extrapolation of the modern Joel Osteen, a character whose followers have advanced from worshiping on television to worshiping television.  It’s an amusing cyberpunk blend of religion and technology, but also a bit frightening; when people start looking for God in their television, you know the outside world is really going to suffer.

The scary thing is, Reverend Fallon’s flock aren’t all that unbelievable.  They hang out in the background as fuel for dystopian thought, while the majority of Virtual Light’s plot plays out in chase scenes and cop drama.  Interestingly, its conclusion steers much closer to the intriguing worldbuilding information Gibson packs into the novel, focusing more on class issues and social strife surrounding the future of San Francisco.  Reading the book days after leaving the city, I loved picking up on Gibson’s geographic references to real places, but ended up coming away with a new respect for his work thanks to the socially conscious blend of present-day class issues, future social problems and a dab of zesty science-fiction dystopia in a fictional 2005 that, even in 2010, edges a little too uncomfortably close to reality.