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| - This isn't exactly anything new. People have been tossing this idea around ever since Virtual Light came out in the early nineties, but they predominantly put the Sprawl Trilogy chronologically earlier than the Bridge Trilogy. Setting the issue of dating aside, since the dates aren't truly important to the characters or stories (Although Virtual Light is said to take place in 2005, the actual year is never mentioned in the book), Virtual Light is assumed to come later because the Nanotech shown in the book seems to be years in advance of any of the technology shown in The Sprawl. However, this is bunk. The Sprawl is decades ahead of The Bridge in almost every area. Domestic spaceflight is commonplace, and artificial intelligences like Wintermute and Neuromancer are incredibly advanced when compared to the Idoru, who is herself considered a leap forward. Not to mention that the interface between user and computer in The Sprawl, cranial electrodes, is far more advanced than the goggles and gloves setups used by characters in The Bridge Trilogy. With this in mind, the answer's obvious: The Bridge predates The Sprawl. Possibly by decades. And what's more, most of the climactic changes necessary to resolve the two are a result of the end of All Tomorrow's Parties. At the end of All Tomorrow's Parties, the Idoru is able to make herself physical and, what's more, to spawn a copy of herself in every Lucky Dragon convenience store in the world. Nanotech is incredibly ubiquitous. But the problems with this are manifold. If a city can be built out of programmed nanites, and nanites can be programmed on demand in Lucky Dragon locations, couldn't nano-assemblers be created in Convenience Stores to take cities apart? The global trauma that separates The Bridge and The Sprawl is the Third World War, and if the Sprawl follows The Bridge, Nanotech has ceased to be ubiquitous for the same reason nuclear power stations are relatively rare in America: the fear of weaponry that uses this technology. What's more, if the Idoru can create copies of herself anywhere in the Western World, Soviet (Or Soviet-Kombinat!) Special Ops A Is could spawn similarly. The Lucky Dragon stores are incorporated into Maas Neotek by the time of the Sprawl series, their gambit having failed. The Idoru's spawning is likely the event that inspired the formation of the Turing Police well before Neuromancer's time. Obviously, Nanotech is too dangerous and stigmatized to be used. Most of the technology of The Sprawl is more utilitarian than The Bridge, more vicious, and it's likely that this tech was invented during the war. The highest-performing computer hardware is based on biological components, which also neatly inverts the standard cyberpunk-hacker stereotype. Gibson's more recent work, his closest to the present, also fits into this schema. Most notably, Hubertus Bigend is pretty much blow for blow a copy of Josef Virek, some years previous. They behave in the same way, both are frequently likened to oversized infants, and both have a penchant for hiring young women involved in some way in arts or entertainment to chase down esoteric secrets. It's implied, when Marly looks into Virek's past, the Josef Virek is not his original identity. The reason that Virek and Bigend are so similar is simple: Virek IS Bigend, the augmented reality from Spook Country evolves into the goggles and gloves rigs from The Bridge. This raises, however, one important issue: Cell Phones. People in The Sprawl and The Bridge don't use them. While cellphones are an indispensable part of everyday life, it's entirely feasible that they could fade away between the Techno Thrillers and The Bridge, like Automats or radium water: 1. Over-advancement. The leaps forward in the power of Smart Phones over the past decade are incredible, but they grow more expensive to manufacture and future proof with every generation. It's feasible that Cellphones consumed augmented reality the same way that they consumed PD As, transforming into portable, personal computers like Chia's Sandbenders. 2. Paranoia. Surveillance Technology is a big theme in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, where various methods (including Volapuk) are used to avoid surveillance. It's possible that the underground figures in The Bridge and the economic underclass eschewed cellphones for practical reasons, the same reason many modern drug dealers still use pagers. 3. Cost. Income inequality in The Bridge is far more pervasive and broad than in real life. It's possible that that kind of portable communication, especially when combined with the first two reasons, would prompt a lot of people to give up their cell phones. A large portion of William Gibson's short fiction can tie into this theory, making for one cohesive world. "Johnny Mnemonic" is already canon, and "New Rose Hotel" and "Burning Chrome" can be tied directly into the Sprawl trilogy without much difficulty. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" likely takes place during the post-War chaos, as it mentions interim governments and extreme resource scarcity; the ASP technology handwaved over is a forerunner of simstim, as is the dream-recording technology in "The Winter Market", which also features the first appearance of ROM constructs like the Dixie Flatline or Finn. "Dogfight" takes place slightly later in the timeline, during or after Neuromancer, as it features a very compact version of the image-projection hardware Riviera uses in that book.
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