Bridge trilogy

The Bridge trilogy is a series of science fiction novels written by William Gibson during the 1990s on the heels of his influential Sprawl trilogy. The series is named for an earthquake-damaged San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge which has become a massive shanty-town hosting an interstitial community. The Bridge trilogy novels include Virtual Light (1993), Idoru, (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999).

Virtual Light (1993)

About Virtual Light

They’d been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way…They were from Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts…Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He’d overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television.
- Chapter 1

Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect…these people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met.
- Chapter 2, “Cruising with Gunhead”

“Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch TV, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”
- Chapter 2, “Cruising with Gunhead”

The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.
- Chapter 3, “Not a Nice Party”

She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth.
- Chapter 3, “Not a Nice Party”

Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum.
- Chapter 4, “Career Opportunities”

Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.
- Chapter 10, “The Modern Dance”

Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.
- Chapter 10, “The Modern Dance”

A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives,” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse.
- Chapter 15, “In 1015”

Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on.
“It’s a virtual light display,” Freddie said, “Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.”
“Telepresence,” Rydell said.
“Naw,” Freddie said, “that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.”
- Chapter 15, "In 1015"

There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore.
- Chapter 16, “Sunflower”

“You got eyes” she said, and yawned in the middle of it, “like two piss-holes in a snowbank.”
- Chapter 26, "Colored People"

When Rydell clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space…he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain…And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain.
“Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman.
“You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-tel space.”
- Chapter 35, "The Republic of Desire" (The Republic of Desire shares several characteristics with the hacker collective The Walled City, which appears in Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties.)

And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.
“Wait. Any of you live in San Francisco?”
The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?”
“Well, do you like it?…Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.”
“Tokyo? Who told you that?”
Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…”
“Tell us” the dinosaur said.
So Rydell did.
- Chapter 35, "The Republic of Desire"

His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.
- Chapter 38, “Miracle Mile”

Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky…And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were. Rydell hadn’t ever seen anything like them…helicopters, but too small to carry anybody…French Aérospatiale gun-platforms…under the control of the Emergency Command Control Communications System.
“Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.
“POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.”
And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts.
The Russians’ mouths were open…
“ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.”
But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands…their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard.
- Chapter 38, “Miracle Mile”

Gibson on Virtual Light

So I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future.
- "Talk for Book Expo, New York," 2010, published in Distrust That Particular Flavor, 2012.

Idoru (1996)

About Idoru

“You haven’t told me what I’m looking for.”
“Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”
- Chapter 3, “Almost a Civilian”

The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both.
- Chapter 5, “Nodal Points”

“But do they really have singers who don’t exist?”
“The idol-singers,” he said. “The idoru. Some of them are enormously popular.”
“Do people kill themselves over them?”
“I don’t know. They could do, I suppose.”
“Do people marry them?”
- Chapter 6, "DESH" (Chia interacting with the Music Master application)

“What did Blackwell mean, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn’t real?”
“Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood.”
Laney closed his eyes, opened them. “Then how can he marry her?”
- Chapter 13, "Character Recognition" (Laney and Yamazaki)

Masahiko’s room…was a boy-nightmare, the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers of friends, its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers…It smelled faintly of boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he seemed very clean, now that she was this close, and she had a vague idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn’t they love to bathe?
- Chapter 18, "The Otaku"

Masahiko pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history…Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross…and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun…and the teacher had to call the police.
- Chapter 20, "Monkey Boxing"

“Okay,” Arleigh said.“What are the nodal points?”
Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds, except the things you see are really there.”
“Yamazaki promised me you weren’t crazy.”
“It’s not crazy. It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”
- Chapter 21, "Standover Man"

Gomi Boy’s cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a perfect white tube with a brown tip he put to his lips. Chia had seen those in old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn’t gone through yet to digitally erase them.
- Chapter 22, "Gomi Boy"

“What kind of hotel did you say this is?” Chia got into the elevator.
“Love hotel,” Masahiko said.
“What’s that?” Going up.
“Private rooms. For sex. Pay by the hour…but people who come here sometimes wish to port. There is a reposting service that makes it very hard to trace. Also for phoning, very secure.”
Chia was looking at the round pink furry bed.
- Chapter 24, "Hotel Di"

If Laney had anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces.
She was nothing like that…And now her eyes met his.
He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows…Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.
- Chapter 25, "The Idoru"

Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.
- Chapter 25, "The Idoru"

“Walled City is of the net, but not on it," Masahiko said. "There are no laws here, only agreements.”
“You can’t be on the net and not be on the net,” Chia said.
“Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile.”
- Chapter 30, "The Etruscan"

”That Walled City, Zona, what is that?“
“They say it began as a shared 'killfile.' It is an old expression. A way to avoid incoming messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those messages never existed. They never reached you. This was when the net was new, understand? Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people who founded Hak Nam were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn’t do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made something like a killfile of everything, everything they didn’t like, and they turned that inside out.”
- Chapter 33, "The Uninvited"

Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.
- Chapter 33, “Topology”

All Tomorrow's Parties‎ (1999)

About All Tomorrow's Parties

"It's all going to change, Yamazaki."
"I don't understand."
"Know what the joke is? It didn't change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I've been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history. Last time we had one like this was 1911."
"What happened in 1911?"
"Everything changed."
- Chapter 1, "Cardboard City"

"And you are obsessed with her?"
"Not with her…Cody Harwood. They're coming together, though. In San Francisco. And someone else. Leaves a sort of negative trace; you have to infer everything from the way he's not there.
- Chapter 1, "Cardboard City" (Yamazaki and Laney)

In Market Street, the nameless man who haunts Laney's nodal configuration has just seen a girl. Drowned down three decades, she steps fresh as creation from the bronze doors of some brokerage. And he remembers, in that instant, that she is dead, and he is not, and that this is another century.
- Chapter 4, “Formal Absences of Precious Things”

That other country, waiting.
He is by trade a keeper of the door to that country.
Drawn, the black blade becomes a key. When he holds it, he holds the wind in his hand.
The door swings gently open.
But he does not draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial…raises his hand to halt a passing cab. Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own.
- Chapter 4, “Formal Absences of Precious Things”

The Tao, he reminds himself, is older than God.
- Chapter 4, “Formal Absences of Precious Things”

The past is past, the future unformed.
There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
- Chapter 4, “Formal Absences of Precious Things”

Living on the bridge, she’d been used to people being around, but everybody had always had something to do up there. The sharehouse was full of USC media sciences students, and they got on her nerves. They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.
- Chapter 7, “Sharehouse”

Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy's eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely.
- Chapter 9, "Sweep Second" (a Jaeger-Coultre Mark XI, 1953)

Chevette fell asleep as Tessa was telling her about a place called the Walled City, how there'd actually been this place, by Hong Kong, but it had been torn down before Hong Kong went back to being part of China. And then these crazy net people had built their own version of it, like a big communal website, and they'd turned it inside out, vanished in there.
- Chapter 11, "Other Guy"

“Chevette,” Tessa said, “she doesn’t exist. There’s no live girl there at all. She’s code. Software.”
“No way,” Chevette said.
“You didn’t know that?”
“But she’s based on somebody, right? Some kind of motion-capture deal.”
“Nobody” Tessa said. “Nothing. She’s the real deal. Hundred-percent unreal.”
- Chapter 15, “Back Up Here”

Rydell had a theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website.
- Chapter 18, “Selwyn Tong”

San Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities.
- Chapter 21, “Paragon Asia”

Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history than love.
- Chapter 21, “Paragon Asia”

They were there, seated in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there before.
One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era…The other presented an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter…
"Mr. Rydell," said the one with the hat, "thank you for coming. You may call me Klaus. This is the Rooster."
"Listen to me, Rydell," the Rooster said. "You are now responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible value. Where is it?"
"I don't know who you are. I'm not telling you anything."
Klaus coughed dryly. "The only proper answer."
"In your situation," said the Rooster, "you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares to address you."
"We are here to assure you, Mr. Rydell, that the resources of the Walled City will be at your disposal in the coming crisis."
- Chapter 29, "Vicious Cycle"

Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature’s way of telling you you had too much money to begin with.
- Chapter 30, “Another One”

The knife's plain haft, against his ribs, through a starched evening shirt.
The handles of a craftman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand.
That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.
- Chapter 31, "View From a Hellward Stanchion" (Konrad and his Tao)

Someday he'll have his shit together right. He'll live in a house, and it will be clean as Lucky Dragon. All lit up like that, and he'll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches. Watch everybody's ass and nobody fuck with him.
- Chapter 37, "A Little Shit Money"

Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise, you'd steal. Boomzilla understands that.
- Chapter 37, "A Little Shit Money"

“[Cody Harwood] is trying to hack reality, but he’s going strictly big casino, and he’ll take the rest of the species with him.”

Everything to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he’d built Skinner’s funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, Fontaine had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner’s room.
- Chapter 38, “Vincent Black Lightning”

Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here.
- Chapter 39, "Panopticon"

Harwood smiles. "A number of major cities have these autonomous zones, and how a given city chooses to deal with the situation can impact drastically on that city's image. Copenhagen, for instance, was one of the first, and has done very well. Atlanta, I suppose, would be the classic example of what not to do." Harwood blinks.
- Chapter 41, “Transam” (with Konrad)

"It's what we do now instead of bohemias," Harwood says.
"Instead of what?"
"Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies…And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct."
"Extinct?"
"We started picking them before they could ripen…as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."
- Chapter 41, “Transam”

Harwood considers him from the distance behind his glasses. “Do you believe in the forces of history?”
“I believe in what brings us to the moment,” Konrad says.
“I seem to have come to believe in the moment myself. I believe we are approaching one, drawn to it by the gravity of its strangeness. It is a moment in which everything and nothing will change…If the world is to be reborn, I wish to be reborn in it, as something akin to what I am today.”
- Chapter 41, “Transam”

There were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood…everybody had something they “really” did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she’d had massages from a girl who was really a stunt double for some actress Chevette had never heard of…
Somebody had everybody’s number, but it looked like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that.
- Chapter 44, “Just When You Think…”

What he needed, Rydell thought, was something he could do that they weren't expecting. Something that put the shoe on the other foot, or anyway he should lose them, whoever they were. He'd had an instructor in Knoxville who'd liked to talk about lateral thinking…What it took, sometimes, was just your basic jack move, something nobody, maybe even you, was expecting.
- Chapter 45, "Jack Move" (These jack moves are further discussed in Pattern Recognition)

"Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work rent-a-cop…These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911—"
"What happened in 1911?" the Rooster demands.
Laney sighs. "I'm still not sure…Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there."
- Chapter 47, "Sai Shing Road"

Rydell watched this man move ahead, in front of him, and felt something complicated. He'd always dreamed of a special kind of grace…what he was seeing now, what he was following: this guy who was maybe fifty, and who moved in a way that kept him in every bit of available shadow…and Rydell followed, in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all these years to be something like this man, whoever and whatever he was.
- Chapter 48, "In the Moment" (Konrad)

"What did you do to that guy?"
"I completed the movement he began when he struck you…His unusual center of gravity made it possible to sever the spinal cord without contacting the vertebrae themselves." This in a tone that someone might use to describe the discovery of a new but convenient bus route.
- Chapter 48, "In the Moment"

"And I'm safer with you than I am with these guys you say are mercs?"
"I think so, yes," the man said, frowning, as though he took the question very seriously.
"You kill anybody else in the past forty-eight hours?
"No, I did not."
"Well," Rydell said, "I guess I'm with you. I'm sure not going to try to fight you."
"That is wise," the man said.
- Chapter 48, "In the Moment"

“[Harwood] is the richest man in the world and ahead of the curve. He’s an agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He embodies paradoxical propositions. Too hip to live, too rich to die. Get it?”
“No.”
“We think he’s like us, basically,” Klaus says. “He’s trying to hack reality, but he’s going strictly big casino, and he’ll take the rest of the species with him.”
- Chapter 51, “The Reason of Life”

Fontaine knows the bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridge's host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing.
- Chapter 60, "Rats Know"

But the one who shines is there, and beside her another, less clear.
"This is Mister Laney," she says, in the language of Silencio's mother. "You must help him. He needs to find a watch." It is a LeCoultre Futurematic, a back-winder, with wind reserve. Silencio knows its serial number, its bid history, its number in today's auction. "Someone is taking it away, and you must follow it."
Silencio looks from the beautiful face of the Futurematic to the face of the woman.
"You must find it for him."
- Chapter 62, "Los Projectos"

Lucky Dragon Nanofax has a hatch on the front Boomzilla could fit through, he wanted to, and he wonders would that make more Boomzillas other places and could he trust those motherfuckers? If he could, he'd have a tight posse but he doesn't trust anybody, why should they?
- Chapter 68, "The Absolute at Large"

The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport become a destination…He has glimpsed the edges of a life there that he feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion.
- Chapter 70, "Courtesy Call"

Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined.
- Chapter 70, "Courtesy Call"

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