I have a couple of distinct memories of this book from the first time I read it: the cop getting into trouble and then getting involved with a TV show about cops who get in trouble; and the vision of the city building itself when Chevette puts on the glasses. What I didn't notice, or don't remember noticing at the time, is that Gibson, compared frequently to Chandler for reasons I never quite cottoned to, is clearly doing Elmore Leonard. It's slightly easier to spot now, because Rydell immediately appears on page as Timothy Olyphaunt playing a younger, rawer Raylan Givens, so that was a bit of a joy to behold.

Published in 1993 and set in 2005, Virtual Light knows it's going to be passed out by the present, and is very much about the late eighties, early nineties. Haunted by the secular ghost Shapley, martyred to cure AIDS, or, no, who helped cure AIDS and was martyred: AIDS hysteria would have been just past its height, and was probably AT its height when Gibson was writing it. What else? There's nanotech, bicycle couriers, a kind of reality TV that seems like an offshoot of COPS, balkanisation, the huddled masses of the poor, earthquakes, the rise of private security, crazy religions and a black president.

So much for the future. Story wise: a courier impulsively steals a pair of glasses and bad people chase her. Rydell, ex-cop-in-trouble and now ex-private security is hired to drive for a man looking for a missing pair of glasses. It's all go from there, but centre stage is Virtual Light's great image of the Golden Gate bridge wrapped and encrusted with the shops and shelters of the poor and the homeless who took it over and made it their own.