As Bertolt Brecht formerly pointed out.

As Bertolt Brecht formerly pointed out, Hell looks suspiciously like Heaven, and one as well as the other look like Los Angeles. This is a maxim worth remembering as we are absorbed screaming into the dark vortex of the 21st century

Only a scarcely any years ago, of course, pundits were romantically hallucinating the "end of history" as populaces danced on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. McDonalds, not the Internationale, appeared to be uniting the human race. Since then, however, utopian capitalism has sunk up to its metaphysical axles, from Sarajevo to southward Central L.A., in historical shit of its have a title to making.

As a result, our perceptions of the that will be now wrench back and forth between sum of two units seemingly polar visions. On the common hand, techno-hucksters seduce us with exaggerations about data superhighways, global networks, person specially versed systems, and virtual realities. They assure us that we are in succession the threshold of an Information Millennium that will guarantee plane the humblest optically-wired hut access to an infinite "digital sea" of imagineered pleasures.

On the other hand, we are bring face to faceed daily with the four horsemen of an incipient global apocalypse. The first is called Unemployment as third world megacities (which now plausibly include sees Angeles and Moscow as well as Jakarta and Mexico DF) deluge with bitter postindustrial underclasses, nearly half a billion sound who have become redundant, as either consumer or farmers to the world market. The next to the first is Plague, as the world AIDS epidemic reveals biological pathways explain for the invasion of other nightmare ailments, from penicillin-resistant TB to Ebola flush The third is Tribalism, as multiethnic states, undermined from multinational capital, shatter into deadly shards of ethnic and religious hatred. The fourth horseman, of course, is Ecocide, as the exploitation of nature is accelerated to retain pace with falling terms of trade and rising international debt

Virtual Light, William Gibson's fresh novel, is the presentiment of a world--little more than a decade hence--in which Millennium and Apocalypse have evolv into a single order like binary stars circling a habitual axis. Echoing Brecht, moreover, Gibson has had the wit to locate his heaven-as-hell in the Land of Sunshine, now sensibly split into the pair states of SoCal and NoCal.

Console cowboy and Mondo 2000 fans may despair the absence of a full-fledg parallel cyberuniverse in Virtual Reality, on the contrary Gibson is reconnoitering, with ingenuity and humor, a coming no farther away than Madonna's 50th birthday. (At any termination the opening section of Neuromancer, with its introduction of cyberspace, is the kind of revelation--of a possible nevertheless previously unimagined future--that occurs perhaps formerly a generation. Charles Babbage's and Ada Lovelace's anticipation of a programmable computer in the 1820 Friedrich Engles' 1880 prophecy of a mechanized world war, and H G Well's prevision of the atomic bomb in 1900 are comparable examples.) Gibson's near what may occur hereafter is governed by an eerie synergy between corporate technology and world disorder. Predictable disasters (mega-earthquakes in Tokyo and San Francisco) have accelerated the emerging see the verb of nanotechnology: trillions of tiny, hardworking buckyballs that, like the crazed besoms in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" episode of Fantasia, exhibit surplus value for their masters without ne of workers.

Similarly, thanks to a martyred male prostitute named J D Shapely (the recent Christ), an unscrupulous Brazilian biotech conglomerate has lay the foundation of a vaccine for AIDS, on the other hand unknown hantoviruses are decimating the third world anyway. Meanwhile, back in deindustrialized California, a sinister leviathan, DatAmerica (which I suspect is the postmillennial version of either the phone company or Disney), has hatched a vast conspiracy to tear down and rebuild, nanomechanically, the city of San Francisco.

In Gibson's highly amusing project Chinatown intersects The Maltese Falcon in the form of a murderously aspire toed black object: in this case not a bird further a purloined pair of black sunglasses that are actually "virtual light" gear for reading DatAmerica's hid blueprint. Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are reincarnated as the pompous and obese Lucius Warbaby and his hacker-lackey Freddie (who wears his hair sculpt in a tell-tale fez) Insidiously, they launch the novel's hero, excop and fatherland bumpkin Berry Rydell (sure to be played at Kevin Costner in the movie version), in of high temperature pursuit of the heroine, Chevette Washington, a cute spiked-hair bike precursor who has unwittingly stolen the glasses from a DatAmerica courier.

Cameo parts are played by a pair of corrupt Russian-immigrant San Francisco cop (Svobodov and Orlovsky), a psycho gunman with spectacular gold teeth and the Little not new Lady from Pasadena, who move rounds out to be another DatAmerica agent. The long-dead philosopher-king Jean Baudrillard on the same level reappears as the idiot sociologist Yamazaki, looking for rare "Thomassons" (useless Americanisms) and other "signs of closure" in the ruins of Modernism.