I keep a commonplace book where I collect phrases, proverbs, sentences, or ideas like a haphazard bouquet of wildflowers. I pick them as they come to me, with no curation save what I share on this blog.
In this series, I’ll offer a quote and meditate on why it deserved to be preserved in my Florilegium.
Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams; tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce with their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy.
William Gibson, Virtual Light
William Gibson of Neuromancer fame is one of my favorite writers. His work, Virtual Light, falls into the cyberpunk genre, but in a far more subtle way than the Sprawl Trilogy. There are evil mega-corporations, corrupt governments, mysterious climate disasters, and all the other accoutrements that accompany the genre, but the story revolves around a pair of high-tech glasses and the powerful entities hunting the glasses down.
Sounds bizarre, I know, but the fun of Virtual Light is the unsettling implications behind the high-tech, low-life world that the characters live in.
That said, if you looking for neon-soaked streets, desperate drug addicts, and cyberspace raids, Virtual Light ain’t it. Cyberspace isn’t mentioned once.
Unlike the Sprawl Trilogy where Console Cowboys melt ICE and chat with mystical AI pseudo-gods, Virtual Light revolves around the Bridge.
The Bridge, what we would know as the Golden State Bridge, has in the seedy near-future, become a ghetto. It’s a holdout for the disenfranchised lowlifes of San Francisco. The passage above is the first glimpse the reader gets of the Bridge.
“Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams.” The Bridge is a massive, haphazardly pieced together architectural marvel of busted beams, splintery planks, and rusted platforms. The shops and bars and stalls are all located on the two lower decks where once cars buzzed from San Fran to Oakland. Above, people have built their homes from whatever scrap they can find.
What draws me to this paragraph is not the strange prescience with which it describes the San Francisco of 2024, but the poetry of it.
Gibson is a poet when the mood strikes him, especially when he’s describing places.
This passage begs to be read aloud with emphasis set on the repeated sounds like an alliterative poem.
“steel bones, its stranded tendons”
“dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines”
“cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars.”
This passage is awash in sounds and scents, a description that gives you what you need to paint a clear picture without robbing you of the joy of letting your imagination hold the brush. I can hear city traffic humming just below the harsh cries of the vendors. I can smell salt and rust and ramen and rotten fish.
This is the kind of paragraph I long to write—words that stick with a reader, that demand to be read again, and then, read aloud. It’s the perfect balance of rhythm and flavor, sweeping you into something at once familiar and utterly alien.
Gibson is a visionary—not just of the future, but a man who really seems to know his craft. As much as his works tend to horrify me, they enchant me too. Virtual Light doesn’t haunt me the way Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive still do, but I wrote down this passage because I couldn’t get it out of my head.
I hope it haunts you too, and it convinces you to give Virtual Light a read, if only for gems like this.
Above: Close up of a Flower. Susanne Nilsson.
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The Salon at Elfland 