William Gibson, Virtual Light, Bantam, 1993. Reviewed by Bluejack      It is a big day for cyberpunks everywhere. A big day, but not necessarily a happy day. William Gibson's new novel Virtual Light has just hit the stores, and it thoroughly disappoints. It may be true: Gibson has lost his edge.      In his first books, William Gibson founded 'cyberpunk,' a new _style_ of science fiction that blends cutting edge technology with a bleak social and ecological future. Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, took technologies currently under development to their probable conclusions and set them in a world in which national boundaries have been replaced by corporate boundaries, and political structures have become vestigial features of the landscape of information. In the cyberspace, cyberpunk world, human flesh and human technology merge, and the desparate struggle for survival and success take place in the intersection of a dying planet and a blossoming computer-generated artificial world. This vision caught the imagination of a new generation of science fiction readers not just because of the range and maturity of his ideas, but also because of the sheer beauty of Gibson's writing.      Following the success of this trilogy, cyberpunk took on a life of its own, peopled by the creations of uncountable imitators, fueled by both the alternative and mainstream media. It has determined the direction of new technologies from computer networks to multimedia; it has sparked thousands of real-world applications of virtual reality technology. So, when William Gibson releases a novel, it is cause for great stirring in the world of science fiction.      Think of him as a prophet. He has a personal mythology: when he first began to write Neuromancer, he didn't know a bit from a byte, a modem from a motherboard. He did a little reading in the popular science press, and combined it with an incisive vision of the future of urban America. He introduced characters that science fiction wasn't used to: small time crooks, underdogs, and pathetic heros, most blissfully and adolescently unaware of the dangers they were putting themselves into. He plunked it out on a manual typerwriter.      Gibson claims he wasn't trying to do anything original. He saw himself in the tradition of Robert Silverberg, Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, or Stanislaw Lem: writing science fiction that was about society, about real people, and about the world we live in now. But he was also writing exciting sci-fi in a voice no one had heard before