Review - idoru - William Gibson

idoru
William Gibson, Viking, 1996

I like William Gibson’s books. I was bowled over by his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which won the Hugo, the Philip K. Dick Memorial, and the Nebula awards - in case you’re not into the genre of Science Fiction (SF), these are all very prestigious. He coined the term “cyberspace”, envisioning both the internet and virtual reality before most people had even heard of them, and Neuromancer was hailed as the “Christ-child of cyberpunk”, (a genre of SF which became self-conscious during the 80s, first characterized as Radical Hard SF, or Neuromantics, or the Mirrorshades group. At its best, it describes with all the linguistic style of the modern novel, a hi-tech future which is sometimes a drug-induced nightmare, sometimes a surrealistic New Age, always just beyond the cutting-edge of physics and metaphysics.) At 48, Gibson is an American draft-dodger who has been living in Canada since he was 19 and has picked up the best of both cultures. His subsequent novels are Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, the best-selling Virtual Light, and his short stories collected in Burning Chrome.

I surfed the net (653 matches to “idoru” found by my HotBot search engine) to give you a flavour of both the man and his writings: “Gibson's stuff is the reactor core steam of all tomorrow's parties breathing down your neck today. Not so much an imaginary future as a highly specific look at a present in midstage adrenaline OD.” (Spin) “Gibson brings to the surface the beast that lurks behind the dense surreal surface of pop culture, simultaneously as meaningful and empty as a video screen.” (The Nation) “Gibson distils a technopunk sensibility with the kick of white lightning and the clarity of white light.” (Village Voice)

So what of Idoru? I was disappointed. If you have never read any Gibson, then start with Neuromancer - and persevere beyond the baffling first pages.

Idoru (a Gibson neologism) is an advanced software program meaning idol-singer or idol-guru. The idoru is an ‘imaginary’ pop star, a cybernetic Madonna of the future - although the Japanese are already creating these as I write. The action is in a new millennium Tokyo, after The Quake, with new self-building buildings, a new mafia, smuggled nano-technology and a couple of innocents-abroad in a big bad technoworld. Colin Laney has a ‘gift’ due to early drug experiments, of fishing for patterns in the dense texture of computer web information. He sees ‘nodes’ and discovers narratives intuitively by accessing the net. For me this was the most interesting feature of the book, as it mirrors contemporary preoccupation with narratives and stories, and the ways that these can convey more than the sum of their parts. In this virtual, holographic future, Gibson is pushing the frontiers of the Flesh made Word which helped me to ponder the Mystery of the Word made Flesh.

The sub-plot concerns Chia Pet McKenzie who is active in the fan club for Lo/Rez, a superstar rock duo. She is bundled off to investigate some new rumours about the plans of Rez, one half of the band, to marry Rei Toei, an “idoru”. She is inadvertently used to smuggle illegal nanoware to the Russian criminal underground and gets caught up with a nice boy-next-door Japanese computer nerd who guides her round the Virtual Walled City and helps save the day. The Famous Five on Acid.

Third Way (not sure they ever published it!)