Gibson and Stephenson

For the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that everyone has read both Stephenson's Snow Crash and Gibson's Virtual Light. Given the publication dates (Snow Crash 1992, Virtual Light 1994) it seems logical to assume that Gibson was, at the very least, influenced by Stephenson's work. Given the incredible similarities between the main characters of the novels: in Snow Crash Hiro Protaganist is a hacker/former security guard/pizza delivery guy/all around nice guy with no real idea what's going on, while the spunky Y.T. is a teenage courier and in Virtual Light Berry Rydel is a former copy/security guard/all around nice guy with no real idea what's going on, while his companion Chevette Washington is also a spunky teenage courier. What's really fascinating about the two novels is that while SC is a parody of the cyberpunk genre pioneered by Gibson, VL seems to be a reaction to the excesses pointed out by Stephenson.

While Neuromancer (1984) and Winter Market (1986) both depict a world in which both the highest of the high and the lowest of the low have access to or at least knowledge of, the technology which have altered their worlds, Virtual Light takes a step down, easing away from the excesses of cyberpunk. Unlike Y.T., for instance, Chevette Washington is a street kid who lives rough and makes her courier deliveries on a bicycle, not a semi-magical skateboard. It is her theft of a pair of sunglasses that sets off the action of the novel. But these are not the ubiquitous mirror shades of either Stephenson's SC or Gibson's earlier work. Chevette is so disenfranchised that she doesn't even know what virtual reality (or virtual light as the novel deems it) is. This is a far cry from Gibson's Sprawl universe, in which Winter Market and Neuromancer are set, or even in SC where everyone seems to be plugged in to the technology of the day. Even Berry Rydel, the novel's hero, who occupies a higher economic niche than Chevette, has only just barely heard of virtual light technology. Stephenson's work, while definitely a parody of cyberpunk, qualifies as post-cyberpunk as defined by Lawrence Person. It's characters are integrated into their society, technology in the form of the metaverse is society, and so forth. What's really interesting is that Gibson, the father of cyberpunk has also achieved post-cyberpunk status in his novel Virtual Light.