I make a point of reading this book every summer. The plot is straightforward enough--like almost all cyberpunk, it involves people getting their hands on forbidden data and being hunted by its rightful owners--but what I really enjoy is the human landscape that Gibson relates. The book is full of images that, for whatever reason, connected with me on a visceral level: the lonely back roads of future California, Skinner's bridgetop apartment, L.A.'s endless convenience stores and strip malls...Gibson keeps his characters moving, and successfully (at least in my case) replicates the strange, gut-level nervousness and odd euphoria of driving around an unfamiliar part of the country at nighttime. It's essentially a cyber-noir road trip story, and the journey is infinitely more significant (and fun) than the destination.
Gibson is cursed to forever take pot-shots from overhormoned teenagers for not rewriting NEUROMANCER again and again. And on rereading NEUROMANCER on the heels of reading VIRTUAL LIGHT, I noticed something for the first time: Gibson's original trilogy (NEUROMANCER/COUNT ZERO/VIRTUAL LIGHT) is missing a human heart at its center. Those books are totally concerned with looking sleek and sexy, full of meaningless sex and casual violence. Characters exist to do kewl things with gadgets and die unpleasantly. VIRTUAL LIGHT and its followups (IDORU and ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES) are different. When violent things happen in these books, it's genuinely affecting because A) it's rare and B) we actually care about the people these things are happening to. Rydell, hero of VIRTUAL LIGHT, is a goofy and charming twentysomething guy from Memphis, Tennessee whose biggest ambition in life is to hold down a paying job. His problems are real, and if Gibson's readers were plunged into the world he writes about, I have a feeling we'd have a lot more in common with Rydell than with a sexy hacker superman like Case.
