Virtual Light, by William Gibson, US$21.95. Virtual Light is a bold step - a composite of his most clearly drawn characters with his most graceful evocation of the future yet. He's loosened some of the chrome plates of his body-armor prose, revealing a soft target of skin underneath.

This isn't the Gibson everyone will want or expect. This small act of rebellion calls down the wrath of the Powers That Be and sets the plot in motion. And his main characters, a luckless ex-cop named Berry Rydell, and a San Francisco bike messenger called Chevette, are neither criminals nor characters with any real connections to the techno- elite who make the machines run and the data flow: Not until Chevette, on a whim, pockets a pair of glasses at a party - glasses that turn out to be a self-contained virtual reality system. The plot centers around Chevette Washington, a young bicycle messenger who lives in the ad hoc, off-the-grid community that has grown on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. His latest novel, published by Penguin, is Spook Country (2007). William Gibson lives in Vancouver, Canada.

The world of Virtual Light is relatively small-scale - all of its action is confined to a second-rate near-future California. William Gibson is the award-winning author of Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Difference Engine, with Bruce Sterling, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition. In Virtual Light, his first solo novel in five years, Gibson reworks many of the themes common to his Sprawl books - the world dominance of multinational corporations, media saturation, the commodification of all aspects of life and, of course, cyberspace - with some new nuances. NASA had the know-how, Leary had the rhetoric, and VPL had the hardware, but it was William Gibson's novel Neuromancer that gave a form and street-level language to the shifting cultural paradigms that birthed cyber-culture (and is partially responsible for the spontaneous generation of, among other artifacts, the 'zine in your hands).

Virtual light by william gibson