Viel schönes dabei.

A Thing I’ve Read 07/26: Virtual Light (Bridge I), by William Gibson

This is not a Sprawl-tale. I am both happy and sad about that.
This is, as per the cover-quote, a tech-thriller, and it is very much set in a cyberpunk-ian dystopia, where it plays out very much on the punk-side and very little on the cyber-side.
The book follows an ex-cop and a bike courier, who stumble into a plot to [redacted] San Francisco, and who are mostly trying to stay alive through the whole ordeal.

It was a good read, and I am very curious what other shenanigans the Bridge-Trilogy will hold.

A well animated movie with almost disturbingly catchy songs, and despite some moments of “wait what” a pretty decent story about, well, a group of demon hunters who in this day and age work their magic as k-pop band needing to face their opponents on their own turf.

Unless the virability of Golden completely put you off of this one forever, consider giving it a go. It’s enjoyable cinema.

The short story collection that, well, collects Gibson’s stories that built the foundation for the Sprawl-trilogy. It contains ten stories, of which I remembered the grand total of three – re-read books, people, you’re in for surprises.

The probably most widely recognized of these stories will be Johnny Mnemonic, given the movie of the same name; the titular Burning Chrome around the Blue Lights-Run and the Gernsback Continuum about glimpses in another past’s future were the others stuck in my head.

Most of the stories fall under the cyberpunk-umbrella, with a few that are more -adjacent scifi, and without fail they are good ones.
If you want to pick up on genre history, pick this up.

This one is… difficult. I love the story, and how it broadens and contextualizes the story of the main game. I adore the location, which as a singular place works well to integrate it in the setting, but leads to a lot of “same way backtracking”. I hate the spatial puzzles, but all of them can be cheesed into nonexistence (even without looking anything up, the things you need to add up are there but not obvious).

What still bugs me most is that one very important information was conveyed so convoluted that I did not catch it, and that massively derailed my playthrough.
Is it a good DLC? Yes.
Is it as great as the base game? No, but your mileage may vary.

The third book of the Sprawl-Trilogy… I don’t want to say “wraps up”, because that’s not what’s happening, but it finishes telling the events set in motion with the Straylight-run.

It brings back characters from the other two, mostly as companions for the POV-characters of this one, and gives closure on some others, and a bunch of context on how the events at Straylight and the Matrix-entities of the second book connect to each other. The ending is a lot of “everyone riding into their own sunset” and the book is mostly the ways there, but as the closing title of a trilogy it works pretty well.

It also would not work well standing alone, so… go read the Sprawl books. They sure are Something, and I think they hold up pretty well.