Hiding out in his cardboard box 'room' in a Tokyo subway, Laney is finally experiencing the stalker effect, even as he manages to identify "the mother of all nodal points," the future space-time point, somewhere in San Francisco in a few days, where a massive convergence will change the world forever. Part of that convergence is Rei Toei, the virtual Japanese idoru ("doll singer"), whom Laney helped to escape from her music industry masters. A second is a nameless man whose allegiance and goals are a mystery, but whose survival skills make him a force to be reckoned with. The third is Laney's stalker-obsession...

Working with a powerful band of vigilante hackers based in an electronic realm called The Forbidden City, Laney is determined to influence the approaching node, hopefully to prevent disaster. Laney's agent of change is everyman Berry Rydell, ex-rent-a-cop and one-time almost-star of the hit TV show "Cops in Trouble." Now reduced to working security in a Los Angeles "Lucky Dragon" convenience store, Rydell is resigned to the hope that something better will come along. Which leads him to accept Laney's job offer in spite of the fact that

"In Rydell's experience, hackers just couldn't resist showing off, and they tended to get all arty. And, he knew, they could usually get your ass in trouble, and usually did."

Also bound for San Francisco is Berry's old flame, buff ex-bike messenger Chevette Washington. Broke and out of work, Chevette is running from an abusive boyfriend, hoping to find friends and shelter in her old stomping grounds in the "interstitial" community living on the Golden Gate Bridge. Along for the ride is Chevette's roommate Tessa, a media student determined to make an award-winning docudrama out of Chevette's life and the comfortably bizarre bridge culture. Together with an impressively wide cast of characters, each is a vector directed toward Laney's nodal point, a force in the unseen battle to control the future's direction.

A skillful mix of present and past tense chapters bring each character to life. Settings gleam with realism, often snarky humour, from the laundromat called "Vicious Cycle" to the shiny plastic Lucky Dragon stores with their cutesy pink logos and graffiti-eating exteriors. Gibson's work has always had a cinematic quality, a vividness that makes reading him like watching a great film unroll inside your head. As always, his prose is polished, but never self-indulgent or vapid.

This latest book also continues the lighter, more hopeful tone of Gibson's recent work -- markedly different from the dark, fatalistic spirit of the Neuromancer series. It's as if he's recreating the future, overwriting the grim cyber-dystopia of his earlier work with a more optimistic, though no less dangerous, view. The scale of the world has also changed. While the Neuromancer series gave us cybernetically enhanced assassins and deft-fingered netrunner cowboys in thrall to amoral multi-national corporations, now regular joes join the battle. Good-natured Berry Rydell is more hero than anti-hero, an undeniably pure soul in a world where it seems nothing should be taken at face value. Likewise Chevette, Tessa, and most of the other point-of-view characters move through the story without shadow agendas; no one except Laney is truly at the end of their rope. Yet Laney, more than the rest, ironically enough, can afford to be philosophical about it. As he muses early on,

"...nothing is perfect, really. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is process."