Deep Strata: Virtual Light, VR dreams, and the Spirit of the '90s – Unsettling Futures - Issue #15
Everyone's been busy dunking on Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse" announcement over the last few days, the big virtual reality app that's going to finally get all of us wearing goggles and gesturing with weird gloves or whatever. The scorn is justified. We've had 30 years of buildup for functioning VR, and what we got was blobby floating torsos in that most exciting of environments – an office conference room!
Virtual whiteboards! Be still my heart!
As Wired Magazine pointed out so effectively a few weeks before the big Facebook announcement, we've had commercial VR, in some form or another, for years, and it just keeps failing to find a broadly popular application. Heck, we've had VR in arcades, in limited capacities, going back to the early 1990s! If it was going to be a thing, it would be a thing by now!
One of the frequent claims for science fiction is that it inspires new technologies, and never has that been more true than for classic-style goggles and gloves VR, a technology that shows up in major 1990s works from the heavy hitters of cyberpunk – in Pat Cadigan's Tea From an Empty Cup, in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in the toolkit of the storm chasers in Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather, and of course, in William Gibson's Virtual Light.
Virtual reality isn't a technology of the present. In some ways, it will always be a technology of the decade in which it was popularized, the 1990s. And that's fitting, because Virtual Light is the most '90s book ever written.
Bike messengers and fax machines, baby!
Virtual Light is the start of Gibson's second trilogy of novels, the Bridge series. Published in 1993, it's set in a nebulous but quite-near future, often said (even on the jacket copy) to be 2005 or 2006, but not confirmed in internal text. (Co-protagonist Berry Rydell is in his early twenties and is said to have been born in 1982.)
Because reality has definitely overshot it, Virtual Light has aged strangely compared to the Neuromancer/Burning Chrome/Johnny Mnemonic world, which is set around the 2030s/2040s. The overshoot means that we can see some radical differences in the way things Really Turned Out compared to Virtual Light – the real world doesn't have an HIV vaccine, a megaquake that levelled Tokyo and another that seriously damaged San Francisco, a woman as U.S. president, a ramshackle squatter's community on the Bay Bridge, and obviously, we don't have commonplace use of nanotech for construction, much less mass use of VR rigs.
But Gibson got an awful lot right. Too much, sometimes.
"They were about to be let out [of school] because LearningNet said there was too much Kansas City flu around to keep kids in Virginia and Tennessee in school that week. They were all wearing these molded white paper masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning. Mrs. Armbruster had just explained the meaning of the word pandemic."
It's also a book in which the middle class has vanished, where private armed response security is omnipresent, and where we're doing a shit job fixing the environment but a great one with the upcoming mass gentrification of San Francisco, around which the plot revolves.
Something you won't hear often is that Gibson is… pretty funny, here. He doesn't get a lot of credit for this, having been defined by Neuromancer's hardboiled style and dystopian setting, but Gibson can do dry wit and cultural satire with the best of them, and Virtual Light really leans into that.
There's Cops in Trouble, an entire reality show dedicated to defending cops who have gotten into lawsuits or criminal charges because they shot somebody, complete with celebrity lawyers.* There's lobby groups for claimed Satanic abuse survivors, a TV-worshipping church, franchised cryogenic brain storage, and a store selling a lurid/racist Southern gothic aesthetic to boho Los Angelenos.
Thing is, Gibson wasn't trying to be predictive, even though there are places where the novel still feels shockingly modern. He was riding the wave of his own time, and that's why I'd suggest any youngsters who didn't live through the 1990s should read this book if they want to know what it felt like.**
The sense that things post-Cold War were strangely unmoored and frangible is omnipresent in Virtual Light. Countries are Balkanizing – Canada has divided into five nations (in real-world 1995 Quebec voted to stay in Canada in a 50.58% to 49.42% referendum vote) and Italy has broken up; California has been divided into SoCal and NoCal states. Russians are only a threat as organized crime and crooked cops. There are dead, abandoned malls. Hackers mess with people because they get paid to, or because they can. Corporations will pay off authorities or use hired killers in pursuit of profit. The spectre of HIV/AIDS hovers over everything. (The fun thing about being born in 1978 is that I got to experience "You might die in a nuclear fireball"/"Unprotected sex will kill you"/"The ice caps are melting" as overlapping messages during my adolescence.) Governments may be malign or indifferent, but they aren't there to help, that's for sure.
And of course, there's the bicycle couriers, like co-protagonist Chevette Washington, as the avatars of cool. Nothing is more 1990s than a bike courier.***
Virtual Light is a book that could only have come out of the era of Smells Like Teen Spirit and riot grrrl bands, of genocidal Balkan wars and Soviet collapse, of the early stirrings of anxiety over urban gentrification, of Cops in endless re-runs on cable, of the Nintendo Power Glove and Jaron Lanier's virtual reality evangelism.
The hologram future conjured in Virtual Light and its sequels would flicker and go dark after fall of the Twin Towers; the Long 1990s – November 9, 1989 to September 11, 2001 – were finally over. Possibilities collapsed, new and harsher realities would assert themselves, and Gibson's next trilogy would explore those, with iPods and smart phones and augmented reality replacing VR goggles as his new technological icons.
Virtual Light remains a book that informs how I think about writing the near future – it never came to pass, it never could have come to pass, but if you were there, in 1993, it can still feel realer, somehow, than what we got. That's the best result you can aim for, as far as I can tell. A near-future science fiction novel is a fever-dream of the present, and few have ever done that better than Gibson did with Virtual Light.
Obligatory self promotion
Yeah, I got nothing this week. Maybe something soon? We'll see.
Remember, you should never share, like, or subscribe to ANYTHING. That's how you get the morgellons. You don't want to get the morgellons, do you?
End Notes:
*Gibson's treatment of cops and private security was pretty cynical for its time – but it's also obviously a pre Black Lives Matter/Police abolition/#ACAB treatment of them.
**I know, you don't care what it felt like. I really, really didn't give a shit what it felt like to live through the 1960s when I was a kid, but man, people would NOT STOP TRYING TO TELL ME.
***Bike couriers are still cool, of course. There's a part of me that wishes I'd gotten into cycling in my teens and done that for a while, although in reality I probably would have slid under a garbage truck's back wheels, doomed by my lack of athleticism.