SOURCE: Ryan, Richard. “On the Run in a Cyberpunk Future.” Christian Science Monitor 85, no. 190 (26 August 1993): 11.

In the following review, Ryan observes that Gibson's Virtual Light offers “an urban panorama that is both spectacular and bleak.”

William Gibson is our Jules Verne. Since the early 1980s, Gibson has offered a vision of the future that seemed both exotic and prophetically plausible. By creating worlds in which computers pressed at the boundaries of reality, Gibson made hackers into heroes and technicians into the next aristocrats. At the same time, his focus on the computer-crime subculture helped launch the cyberpunk movement, a silicon underground of software, anarchy, and urban grit.

While Gibson's fans love his street-wise plots and his over-heated prose style, critics have admired his message of human adaptability to technical change. It now appears that Gibson wants to present his pop-sociology in a more relevant setting. His new novel...