Virtual Light continues to display Gibson's inventive use of surface texture to create a vivid future world.

Details of clothing, smells, colors, and textures are densely created along with the strange new customs and language of a post-earthquake California. Gibson creates new language for his new world. Perhaps the most memorable are the phrase proj on, a 2005 biker version of the concept of "keep on truckin,'" and the term a Thomasson to describe a "pointless but curious" and interesting phenomenon like the Bridge community. Denizens of Gibson's NoCal and SoCal frequent a bar called Cognitive Dissidents, listen to a band called Chrome Koran singing "She God's Girlfriend," and favor body piercing and tattoos.

Although Gibson writes in an impressionistic, fragmented style that has become one of his trademarks, the novel is less frenetic than Neuromancer and, in many ways, less unconventional. Plot development, as in Mona Lisa...