“”1

Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (U L B) 1997

Biography William Ford Gibson was born on March 17, 1948 in Conway, South Carolina; he was raised in a southwest Virginia small town. His father, a contractor, had worked on the project—the development of the American atom bomb during WWII—and died when William was six. In the sixties, Gibson dropped out of high school and moved to Canada, where he joined the local hippie scene; he became a devoted rock fan—a cultural interest that would later influence his fiction. An opponent to the Viêt Nam War, he stayed in Canada in order to avoid being drafted. In 1972, he married Deborah Thomson, a teacher, with whom he had two children. The couple settled in Vancouver. Gibson took his B.A. at the University of British Columbia in 1977. He discov- ered his potential as a writer when taking a class in college. His first stories, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose," "" and "" were published in science-fiction magazines in the late seventies and early eighties. Gibson was at the time a member of the "" group—a set of authors gathering around writer and critic , the editor of the SF fanzine Cheap Truths. In the mid-eighties, two events contribut- ed to making cyberpunk the new vital edge of science-fiction: on the one hand, Gibson published his first (1984), which was granted the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards the same year; on the other hand, Bruce Sterling published (1986), an anthology of cyberpunk short stories, several of which by Gibson; Sterling's preface to the collection defined the characteristics of cyber- punk as a genre. Gibson's Neuromancer, still to this day regarded as the paradigmatic work of the movement, turned out to be the first volume in a "" trilogy that also includes (1986) and (1988). These three , together with short

1 This paper was initially published in Post-War Literatures in English (Leiden, NL: Martinus Nijhoff, Sept. 1997). 2 Den Tandt “William Gibson” stories like "Johnny Mnemonic," "New Rose Hotel" and "," make up Gibson's "Sprawl" cycle—named after the Eastern seaboard in which these narratives partly take place. Gibson's short fiction of the early eighties was collected in Burning Chrome (1986). In 1990, Gibson and Bruce Sterling coauthored The , a cyberpunk novel set in the Victorian age. Gibson's latest novel to this day is (1993). His works outside the traditional fiction format include Aggrippa (1992), a non-SF text recorded on a self-erasing file, illustrated with engravings by New York artist Dennis Ashbaugh, as well as the screenplay for the film version of "Johnny Mnemonic" (1994). Gibson is also the author of several nonfiction articles and reviews.

Critical The science fiction movement to which Gibson belongs, writer Samuel Delany explains, owes its name to Bruce Bethke's story "Cyberpunk," written in 1980 and published in 1983 (see Dery, 199). The term was picked up by critics to designate a literary group that, ironically, did not include Bethke himself: the set of writers revolving around Bruce Sterling—William Gibson, , Marc Laidlaw, Greg Bear, and . After Gibson's highly successful Neu- romancer, cyberpunk became a household term and was grudgingly accepted by the writers themselves; "cyberpunk," Bruce Sterling re- veals in his preface to Mirrorshades, supplanted previous labels like "Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, or the Mirrorshades Group" (Mirrorshades ix). Like punk rock musicians, Sterling argues, the early-1980s writers are characterized simultaneously by their raw spontaneity and by their acute self-consciousness as to their place within well-developed tradi- tions. Among canonical writers, the draw inspiration from the technological allegories of and William Bur- roughs. In science-fiction, the influences acknowledged by Gibson, Sterling and his friends cover the whole spectrum of the genre: early masters like Jules Vernes and H.G. Wells; Pulp fiction stories and SF comics, technologically-oriented hard SF; as well as 1960s New Wave SF authors like , Joanna Russ, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, and J.G. Ballard. With regard to these antecedents, the cyber- punks advocate a "return to the roots" (Sterling xi), that is a revival of what Sterling, in the preface to Gibson's Burning Chrome, calls a "self- consistent evocation of a credible future" (Burning 10). This commit- 3 ment to a postmodern variety of socio-technological differenti- ates the cyberpunks from 1960s and 1970s writers—Ursula LeGuin, Roger Zelazny—whose works verged on "sword and sorcery fanta- sies," and who addressed a broader audience than the stereotypical techno-nerds of SF (Burning 10). The core thematics of cyberpunk is the interaction of characters with technologically-managed information. On the basis of Gibson's Neuromancer, we can further define the genre as a form of postmodern science fiction that depicts information communities of the near future where social relations are constructed by means of computer systems. In 1984, at a time when cyberpunk barely had any public existence, Fredric Jameson all but prophesied the movement when he highlighted the importance for postmodern culture of a form of literature he called "'high-tech paranoia'"—narratives in which "interlocking and compet- ing information agencies" struggle for the control of "the circuits and network of some putatively global computer hookup" (38). Jameson's description does not fully do justice to the fact that in spite of their world-wide electronic interconnections, the cyber societies of the new SF are decentred; within their networks, power circulates in unstable fashion among giant corporations, techno-literate and criminal rings. Accordingly, cyberpunk narratives are set in heteroge- neous locales, whether in real or virtual space; characters include motley collections of biological persons, artificial intelligences, and the paradoxical beings obtained from the interfacing of human bodies and electronic circuitry. Power in the cyberpunk world revolves around the control (production, appropriation, phagocytization, destruction) of information and access codes. Gibson's gradual elaboration of his own cyberworld is traceable in his early short fiction, collected in Burning Chrome. Some of the stories in this volume settle accounts with what Gibson calls the "to- morrow that never was" (38)—science fiction ideologies the author no longer has any use for such as scientific utopianism ("The Gernsback Continuum") and space travel ("Red Star, Winter Orbit," "Hinter- lands"). The protagonist of "Gernsback" suffers from hallucinations in which his 1980s present is invaded by beings and machines—"shark- fin roadsters, flying-wing liner[s]" (Burning 37)—straight from 's Amazing Stories pulps of the 1930s; Gibson delivers thereby a scathing caricature of 1930s future worlds crammed with fascistic Art Déco architecture and square-jawed supermen on a food- pill diet. "Red Star," coauthored with Bruce Sterling, chronicles the 4 Den Tandt “William Gibson” insurrection of a Soviet orbital station phased out because space explo- ration is no longer economically viable. Ultimately, the station is taken over by a commune of environmentally-conscious space squatters. Characteristically, in "Red Star," the are no longer a dominant world power; likewise, "Hinterlands"—an allegory close in format to New-Wave SF—presents a disenfranchised humankind that acts as an archaic tribe facing the mysteries of an incomprehensible : its explorers sent into hyperspace return dead or psychotic, holding on to cryptic extraterrestrial trinkets human researchers must investigate for years. The other stories of Burning Chrome piece together the universe of common references—technology, characters, institutions, slang—of the author's Sprawl cycle—the narratives set in the Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Authority. These texts explore various techniques by which consciousness and corporate technology interface: they depict, for instance, game consoles plugged in to a character's brainwaves (""); devices called simstim rigs that allow people to jack in to another body's sensation ("Fragments of a Hologram Rose," "Winter Market"); and encoding procedures by which characters merge "with the net" (140), thus ending up as a personality "construct" recorded on computer disk ("Winter Market). "New Rose Hotel" reveals that the economic basis of this technology is a system of big corporations—the "zaibatsus," in their Japanese form—whose employees can be inden- tured until criminal conspiracies help them defect. "Burning Chrome" and "Johnny Mnemonic," both of them trial runs for Neuromancer, orchestrate these elements with great concision and flair. Characters in "Johnny" have all been reshaped through cosmetic surgery, electronic implants or grafts. The protagonist rents a psychotic layer of his perso- na—his "idiot/savant" mode (15)—for the storage of confidential corporate information that he cannot access himself. With the help of Molly Millions—the stereotypical warrior of the Sprawl, who sports surgically-implanted mirrorshades and retractile fingerblades— Johnny manages to escape assassins commisioned by crime rings eager to retrieve his stashed data. Eventually, Johnny finds shelter with the "Lo Teks" (30) a subculture that tries to opt out of urban technology. "Burning Chrome" describes the computer paraphernalia of this uni- verse, as well as the catch-words of cyberspeak: here, the protagonists are —i.e. console "cowboys" or "jockeys"(197)—addicted to making raids through the "cyber matrix"—the field of virtual graphics displaying the planet's information networks with the clarity of a "con- 5 sensus-hallucination" (197). The two heroes obtain from a retailer of hacking gear—the Finn, a ubiquitous figure in the Sprawl cycle—an "icebreaker" program meant to neutralize "black ice" (207, 210); this ominous term designates the security systems that protect data and can induce "flatlining," i.e., the hacker's death. Thus equipped, the two hackers manage to "burn" the data banks of a mob-related woman named Chrome—ultimately a lackluster feat, in the story's logic. Neuromancer (1984), the first book-length instalment of Gibson's Sprawl cycle, struck many reviewers by its vivid sense of worldness: it brings to life all the details of an unfamiliar universe. This critical response was due to the fact that Gibson deployed for the first time in book form an already well- tested stock of gadgetry and types. The setting of Neuromancer has the slick international character of James Bond movies—Japan, the Sprawl, Turkey, and orbital stations. These real-space venues alternate with the abstract "nonspace" of the cyber matrix and with uncanny "pocket worlds"—realistic locales engineered by virtual simulations. Narratively, Neuromancer deals with a success- ful heist in cyberspace. The plot formulae Gibson uses here are para- digmatic of most cyberpunk writing in that they mix features of the noir genre with what film critic Will Wright, in an analysis of Sam Peckinpah's westerns, has called the "professional plot"—stories about groups of experts with a mission (see Wright 164). In the first chapters, Case is a noir loser who has lost his talents as a computer cowboy and is stranded in a Japanese bar "for professional expatriates" (3). The story kicks off when he is asked to join a team of characters with complementary skills—among which Molly, the martial arts experts ("Johnny Mnemonic"); the Finn, the cyber gear salesman ("Burning Chrome"); the Flatline, a computer construct of a dead hacker; the Panther Moderns, a group of Sprawl media terrorists; as well as the Zionites, an orbital commune of Rastafarians living in the margins of the cyber culture. This motley crew has been commissioned to provoke the fusion of two artificial intelligences—Wintermute and Neuro- mancer—virtual constructs with citizenship rights. This task, whose outcome will change the overall balance of power in cyberspace, involves cracking the defenses of a family-based company—the Tessier-Ashpools, an inbred capitalist clan walled off from the outside world. The team also has to steer away from detectives that keep artifi- cial intelligences in check. Their task accomplished, the partners scat- ter. 6 Den Tandt “William Gibson”

Gibson's adventure tale of cyberspace is quintessentially post- modern, academic readers have argued, because it makes us reconsider whether the possibility of a political realism of the postindustrial tech- nostructure. The radical potential of Gibson's Neuromancer, Samuel Delany has remarked, resides in the fact that, at the time of its publica- tion, it was one of the few sf texts that explicitly mentioned that "there are such things as multinational corporations" (Dery 196). Likewise, Fredric Jameson argues that the literature of "high-tech paranoia" belongs among the "new forms of realism" that provide a "cognitive mapping" (54) of our situation—thus making visible how unrepresent- able and fragmented the structures of postindustrial capitalism are (49). These arguments place Gibson's cyberpunk at the center of what we might call "low" —the cultural forms that rework the issues of through the medium of popular art. While the cyberpunks acknowledge the influence of "high," experimental post- modernism, their works are marketed through the commercial channels that broadcast other postmodern popular media like hip-hop music, rock videos, and science fiction thrillers like 's (1982). In Jameson's critical perspective, cyberpunk— the literature of technological subversion—might therefore work as a medium of political didacticism and resistance intended for a broad audience. The realistic acumen of cyberpunk has, however, been questioned by Joseph Tabbi, who finds the genre too epistemologically naive to map the power logic of postmodern technology. This enterprise, Tabbi believes, must start out from a theoretical exploration of literary dis- course—an approach adopted by high postmodernists like Pynchon or William Gaddis. By comparison, cyberpunk does not subject techno- corporations to realistic debunking: it rather glamorizes their "populist technology" (218)—personal , video games. In this logic, Gibson's belief that "[t]he streets finds its own uses for things" (Dery 194)—that there can be a pluralistic, popular appropriation of techno- logical power—remains close to fantasy politics: Delany underlines, for instance, that Gibson's technopopulism has no relevance whatever to the alienation of the L.A. blacks who took part in the 1987 Rodney King riots. He points out also that the Zionite community of Neuro- mancer, far from embodying a practicable model of subcultural subver- sion, is a regressive pastoral romance, whose characters are disempow- ered towards technology. 7

While I do not mean to deny that there is romance politics in cy- berpunk—in Neuromancer, particularly—I wish to argue that the genre is a useful vehicle for what we might call the local color realism of the technosphere. I have emphasized Gibson's efforts to construct a gadget- crammed realistic texture for his narratives because I believe that there is room in postmodern fiction for an sf literature of the local gaze. The postmodern situation, by delegitimating any authoritative mapping of the totality of our world, creates a mismatch between global and local perspectives: without a master grid, what is perceived at a local level will not necessarily fit the guidelines of a broader theoretical blueprint; thus, the fact that high-postmodernist allegories—Pynchon's The Cry- ing of Lot 49, say—successfully grasp the large-scale logic of the information societies does not invalidate the perspective of works that cover the same field from a factually-oriented viewpoint. In this light, cyberpunk enjoys a specific area of expertise: as an sf genre, it cannot content itself with stringing together allegorical vignettes; the very conventions of science fiction remain indeed wedded to a positivist epistemology, so that cyberpunk must play the realist game of scanning visible surfaces of social life—even if what is thus de- scribed—the "impossible totality" of postindustrialism, as Jameson puts it (38)—seems to defeat that enterprise. Local color realism in cyberpunk, beyond Gibson's predilection for laundry lists of cyber gadgets, allows the author to examine scrupu- lously how a world of spatial, electronic, and biological interfacings hangs together—how its locales, languages, bodies connect into larger entities. This concern for linkages and discontinuities is the expression at a local level of the thematics, essential to the Sprawl cycle, of the closure and fragmentation of the cybermegalopolis: is the cyberworld closed (totalitarian, knowable) or is it open-ended (pluralist, inexhaust- ible)? On this issue, Gibson combines the sf predilection for open- endedness with a commitment to multiculturalism. The fear of seeing technology function as a closed system is expressed in the consistently negative portrayal of the Tessier-Ashpool family trust, which embodies the evils of parental authoritarianism, paranoia, and greed. Yet in the semi-dystopian universe of the cyberspace trilogy, Gibson can not oppose to this claustrophobic social model the idyllic blueprint of a fully reconciled pluralist polity. The less-than-perfect social cohesion of the Sprawl is illustrated in the universal interfacing made possible by hostile take-overs: by means of tactical mimicry, "icebreaker" viruses can identify with their target to the point of invisibility, in order to 8 Den Tandt “William Gibson” phagocytize them. On the face of it, this strategy demonstrates that there is simultaneously unity, continuity, difference and subversion in cyberspace: corporations can by recruitment, conquest, or mergers aspire to the status of disembodied bodies enjoying "a kind of immor- tality" (203); conversely, subcultures like the Zionites or the techno- punk Panther Moderns can carve out their niche in the system, like cysts or parasites. Yet, when Gibson provides a close-up scanning of the modalities of interlocking, the procedure is revealed to be a forcible suturing of incompatible elements: Case, for instance, feels "an abrupt jolt into other flesh" (56) when his simstim rig switches him from the "neuroelectronic void of " (115) to Molly's disruptive physi- cal sensations. Discontinuities are most grotesquely brought to light in portrayals of surgical grafts: punks in Neuromancer harbor animal faces made up of "a simple graft grown on collagen and shark cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous" (59). Likewise, the re- searchers who try to abort Case's run are imperfect cosmetic collages; under their expensive skin overlays, "their youth [is] counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were unable to erase" (159). These close-up descriptions, ranging from realism to the grotesque, bring out the precariousness of the cyberworld. As Gibson moved from Neuromancer to Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) he made the fragmentation or hypothetical unity of the informational metropolis one of the most explicitly thema- tized issues of the cycle. This "quest for the Shape" of the matrix, as a character in Mona Lisa puts it (79), is carried out against a background of anxieties over dissociation: in these texts, the virtual matrix, which in the earlier volume, acted as a fabric of continuity, seems to recede to the background of the characters' experience. Fragmentation is also perceptible in the novels' narrative format: Gibson, emulating John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, interweaves parallel stories—professional plots involving new characters as well as Sprawl regulars like Molly—that converge by sheer story-telling virtuosity. A splinter story of Count Zero provides a metafictional comment on this story-telling method: art dealer Marly Kruschkova has been commisioned to locate the author of exquisite boxes filled with collections of nostalgic trivia. Ironically, Marly discovers that the collage artist is a robot guided by an . The machine's picturesque microcosms, assembled out of junk by non-human choice, delight Marly because—like Gibson's 9 novels, presumably—they express yearnings for the recomposition of a fragmented world. The counterforce to fragmentation in Count Zero and Mona Lisa is, surprisingly, magic. When the matrix manifests itself at all, it does so in the guise of personalised spiritual entities—Voodoo gods. Magic shapes the itinerary of the main characters of the two novels—Angela Mitchell and her lover Bobby Newmark (a.k.a. Count Zero). The former is a simstim star who, as a child, was given neural implants allowing her to hook up to the matrix telepathically; the latter is a console cowboy whom Angela, thanks to her quasi-magical gifts, saved from black-ice death. To the Voodoo priests of the Sprawl, Angela is "Vièj Mirak," the "Virgin of Miracles" (88) who can dialogue with the legba or loa—the spirits of cyberspace. Angela's narrative, in contrast with Marly's in Count Zero, suggests that animism is the only idiom through which the unity and multiplicity of the virtual planet can be phrased. Through Angela's intermission, we learn that the cyber matrix became unified and sentient when the two artificial intelligences of Neuromancer merged. Contacts with an extraterrestrial, matrix brought about the breakup of the cyber grid, whose splintered artificial intelli- gences from then on took on the masks of Voodoo spirits—decentred godheads, as it were. When Mona Lisa Overdrive closes, Angela and her friends are called by the legba to retire to a virtual "pocket world," where, as computer ghosts, they can move on to Alpha Centauri to contact the extraterrestrial beings. Gibson's discourse of magic seems to shift his trilogy from hard sf to the mythologies of the fantasy genre. In this guise, the Sprawl cycle might read like a technopsychedelic manifesto, expressing the hope that computer networks may expand the minds of their users. Scott Bukat- man has argued that cyberpunk describes the logic by which technolo- gy changes the structure of the self. He contends that cyberpunk novel- ists—as well as the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway—construct "a new subject-position" meant to "interface with the global realms of data circulation, a subject that can occupy or intersect the cyberscapes of contemporary existence" (9). These "terminal identities," Bukatman suggests, are disembodied and decentered; they are therefore freed from the restraints of both individ- ualism and the regimentation of central systems. Bukatman's argument can, however, easily shift into a simplistic celebration of electronic ecstasy and bodilessness. Cyberpunk would then reduplicate the tech- nopsychedelic utopianism voiced by McLuhan in the 1960s: the Cana- 10 Den Tandt “William Gibson” dian sociologist regarded the media as "extensions of man" whose worldwide interconnection—the "global village" (Understanding 93)— would bring about "instant total field awareness" (56). McLuhan there- by hints at a media-generated trance amounting to a return to the "pre- verbal condition of men" (83). Gibson, who often depicts interfacing as an experience akin to shamanism or drugs, rewrites this ideal of magi- cal electronic mediation in decentred terms: instead of seeking what McLuhan calls "a newfound 'wholeness'" in interconnection (Under- standing 21), he charts a cyber matrix where "getting things done" is performed by conjuring up a plurality of pagan spirits (Gibson, Count 111) . If we view Gibson's cycle as a socially didactic text, however, his cyberpunk magic appears as an allegorical representation of the reifica- tion of language induced by computer culture. In a Marxist perspective, data processing amounts to an electronic accumulation of dead labor— practices that were once performed within easily decipherable face-to- face exchanges. With the complexification of technology, however, there is, as Bruce Sterling puts it, no "single human being left in the world who fully [understands] what [is] going on in [the] little boxes" of computer circuitry (Weather 154). Thus, information currents seem to acquire a life of their own. Like Marx's commodities, whose human- made origin is obscured by the intricacies of the market, they become fetishized forces similar to Gibson's Voodoo spirits, acting out of their cryptic volition. This realistic view of cyber magic underlies the pas- sage of Gibson's Mona Lisa where an artificial intelligence reveals to Angela that there are no real ghosts in cyberspace, only virtual entities that "sought form" in "the paradigms of vodou" (257). That these delocalized artificial intelligences may themselves symbolize elusive real-world corporations is suggested by a splinter story of Mona Lisa, which revolves around thirteen-year-old Kumiko Yanaka. The daughter of a Japanese Yakuza lord whose criminal empire is vacillating, Kumi- ko is perpetually tossed around, listening to real or virtual mentors. Her helplessness towards her father's occult world of corporate conspiracies mirrors, on a secular plane, the befuddlement of Bobby and Angela towards the spirits of the matrix. With (1990), a novel co-authored with Bruce Sterling, Gibson sets aside supernaturalism and provides a brilliant instance of what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographical meta- fiction—a text that interrogates "the nature of representation in histori- ography" (Hutcheon 50). The Difference Engine, arguably Gibson's 11 second most important novel to date, is Victorian-Age cyberpunk, otherwise known as . It transposes the issues of tomorrow's information metropolis one hundred and fifty years into the past. The text's premise is that early-nineteenth-century Britain took a dramatic leap into the era of information: steam-driven computers, modelled after the "difference engine" of pioneer cybernetician Charles Bab- bage—a historical figure—are being used for police work, science and entertainment. Politically, the country is run by the Radical Industrial- ists, a coalition of "savants" and capitalists, headed by, of all people, . In the tradition of the postmodern encyclopedic novel and , this highly documented work is crammed with ironi- cal anachronisms: many characters are historical figures in displaced functions: John Keats is a petty-bourgeois "clacker"—a hacker Victori- an-style, who operates a "kinotrope"—a cybernetically-operated screen, anticipating present-day TV. Disraeli is a disempowered publicist whose aphorisms ("'Knowledge is power'") (175) anticipate Foucault; the Crimean War plays the part both of Viêt Nam and of Orwellian conflicts of attrition; Luddite machine breakers, eager to plant viruses into government computers, are revolutionary forebears of present-day environmentalists; North America, due to British diplomacy, is split into five nations, among which a Marxist commune set in New York. The story-line of The Difference Engine revolves around envi- ronmental disaster, Luddite subversion, and the conspiratorial politics of a technocratic regime. The main protagonist, Edward Mallory, is a paleontologist eager to make a career in the hierarchy of official sci- ence. When smoke from thousands of billowing smokestacks nearly causes an ecological apocalypse in London, Mallory, together with a band of law-and-order devotees (the Victorian equivalent of cyberpunk professionals), stands up against the rioters. Narrative in this novel is, however, eclipsed by the highly ingenious local realism of the authors’ historical (re)constructions, by their intertextual ironies, and by the text’s didactic payload. The novel’s scientific argument revolves around catastrophism: Gibson and Sterling underline similarities link- ing catastrophist concepts of evolution and, on the other hand, the principles of chaos theory underlying the behavior of complex systems like data processing programs. As Mallory himself puts it, computer simulations suggest that "[c]omplex systems can make sudden trans- formations" (115). In the story, this concept of evolution accounts for the apparition of the "Great Stink" (176) that overcomes London. In a 12 Den Tandt “William Gibson” metafictional perspective, it underlies the very idea that the history of the nineteenth century might have bifurcated as depicted in the text. Virtual Light, Gibson's latest novel, returns to our very near fu- ture—the early decades of the cybermetropolis. The text covers issues discussed in the author's previous works, yet with a heightened degree of expository explicitness. In these pages, Gibson explores a culture where, as Japanese student Yamazaki puts it, "[m]odernity [is] ending" (90). As he speaks, the young man is gazing from Oakland Bridge to the outline of , which has by now been shat- tered by earthquakes. The Bridge itself accommodates a self-organized, flexible community of squatters bringing together the city's subcultures. Gibson's view of San Francisco stands as a postmodern response to Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930): while Crane's modernist poem cele- brated through the symbol of Brooklyn Bridge the miraculous union of opposite forces, Gibson presents a society that must make good with irreconcilable fractures. The wealthy live in suburban "stealth houses" (12) or private malls, while the poor build their own networks of soli- darity out of the debris of civilization. The virtual light mentioned in the title is, in this context, a tool of social diagnosis: the main story-line focuses on biker messenger Chevette, who has stolen a pair of Virtual Light mirrorshades and finds herself chased by ruthless mercenaries. The glasses are precious because they enable their wearer to instantly decipher the corporate data that hides behind the surface of things. With Chevette's virtual glasses, Gibson provides a proper symbol of the sociological didacticism that, I have argued above, is central to his fiction. His brand of cyberpunk ranges from broad reflections about the lack of readability of technologically-proficient polities to minutely detailed anticipations of their development. The theoretical import of this sociology is expressed in the concept of cyberspace itself, which, Gibson explained in a 1994 interview, "is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the second world war we've increasingly done so many of the things that we think of as civilization" (qted in Josefsson 1). At the local end of this analytical spectrum, Gibson's novels practice what might be called a prospective topicality—journalism of the near future. In Virtual Light, for instance, Gibson reminds us of the existence of Padania, a country that exists, if not as an actual political entity, at least in the program of present-day Northern Italian separatists. The value of this literary sociology must, however, also be measured, by what it excludes or papers over. Gibson is, I think, never as good as when he brings to light corporate strategies 13 and the power of wealth. On the other hand, I have mentioned that his commitment to what Lance Olsen calls a postmodern "micropolitics" (Slusser 144)—a celebration of subcultures—remains at a safe remove from real-world political struggles: the dissident groups of his fiction— the Lo Teks, The Panther Moderns, the Gothicks, the Oakland Bridge squatters—are nearly interchangeable romanticized avatars of the 1960s . Also, cyberpunk, however dystopian its vision of the information metropolis, cannot shed a white male elitist bias due to its romance with technological prowesses. In the sf tradition, Samuel Delany explains, technology has acted "like a placard on the door saying, 'Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Blacks and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!'" (Dery 188). Against this ostracism, Gibson himself has denounced the social fracture induced by lack of computer literacy (see Josefsson 3). Yet in his fiction, it is not clear whether he manages to drive his multiculturalist vision further than the standards of present-day Hollywood action movies: Gibson's world is a place where noble savages coexist with male fantasies like Molly Millions, the castrating amazon warrior, and with minority or female protagonists whose empowerment has apparently been gained more by magical intervention than by political practice.

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