Product Description
In twenty-first century Tokyo, Rez, one of the world's biggest rock stars, prepares to marry Rei Toe, Japan's biggest media star, who is known as the Idoru and who exists only in virtual reality. Reprint."

Amazon.com Review
The author of the ground-breaking science-fiction novels Neuromancer and Virtual Light returns with a fast-paced, high-density, cyber-punk thriller. As prophetic as it is exciting, Idoru takes us to 21st century Tokyo where both the promises of technology and the disasters of cyber-industrialism stand in stark contrast, where the haves and the have-nots find themselves walled apart, and where information and fame are the most valuable and dangerous currencies.

When Rez, the lead singer for the rock band Lo/Rez is rumored to be engaged to an "idoru" or "idol singer"--an artificial celebrity creation of information software agents--14-year-old Chia Pet McKenzie is sent by the band's fan club to Tokyo to uncover the facts. At the same time, Colin Laney, a data specialist for Slitscan television, uncovers and publicizes a network scandal. He flees to Tokyo to escape the network's wrath. As Chia struggles to find the truth, Colin struggles to preserve it, in a futuristic society so media-saturated that only computers hold the hope for imagination, hope and spirituality.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 141 reviews)

Idoru

William Gibson offers a fresh squirt of cyberpunk panache with Idoru, named for the Japanese celebrity that doesn't exist, around which the story pivots.

A few decades from now, the celebrity is where the money's at. Colin Laney is the man who can see through the data-trails that such people - or any people - leave as they pass through a high-tech life: credit card transactions, internet surfing, online purchases, the TV channels you watch, the flights you catch. Hired by a media company, Laney tries to find the trail of Rez, one half of the hottest musical partnership Lo/Rez. Rez is also the man who has recently announced that he wishes to marry the idoru, a celebrity who exists only as a digital avatar ...

Also searching for Rez is one of his biggest fans, a 14 years old named Chia who wants to know if the crazy rumours are true. Flying to Tokyo where the idoru is based, she soon falls into a maze of trouble involving nanosmugglers, an evolution of the Russian mafia, and a group of otaku technogeeks operating out of the virtual Walled City.

Chia serves as the innocent eyes viewing the insanity of the world that Gibson is presenting, the same universe in which his 1993 novel Virtual Light is set. It is frantic, post-modern and frothing with insane tech. The nature of the world is the nature of the novel, which has the TV-remote-rapidity of earlier hits like Neuromancer, which set the stage for the genre and inspired such films as The Matrix. The writing is sharp and fast, described accurately on the cover as being "as glacially poetic as J. G. Ballard's", which pretty much hits the nail on the head.

The dialogue is modern and snappy, but the technology of this future contrasts with the modish gadgetry of the Neuromancer universe, sometimes coming off a little trite (virtual reality experienced through boxy goggles and wired-up gloves, for example). The frothy exposition and fast-paced narrative rapidly swallow any such minor complaints though, leaving the text roiling with cool gimmickry and spunky, laconic characters. As the story unfolds, the reader is exposed to not more of a thinly-constructed world, as in a lot of post-modern science fiction, but of new layers of Gibson's new Tokyo, stacked both upwards and down, slotted within the underlying accounts of an earthquake that levelled parts of the city, which are left to crumble further as other areas are rebuilt with rampant nanotech.

Thankfully Gibson deals with his world with total confidence, which beams through every page. The text is neat, precise and engaging, with realistic characters the reader is comfortable relating to. A fast, thoroughly entertaining read that cyberpunk fans will exhilarate in assimilating.

July 05, 2008

for jaded futurists in search of "that physical thing"

There is an odd surface tension here; some readers may approach Idoru from the wrong bias, through the lens of Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy. Those readers will expect the traditional cyberpunk romp of amphetamine-fueled Yakuza battles and twisted violent sex in coffin hotels; those readers will be disappointed and may not be able to penetrate the skin of this charged, deeply emotional book. Idoru is William Gibson's Through the Looking Glass.

In typical Gibson style, the dueling narratives follow two distinctly melancholy characters: there is the starry-eyed teenaged angst of Chia Pet McKenzie and the existential, nearly Phildickian dread of Colin Laney. The novel opens on Laney, recently terminated under dubious circumstances from his "quantitative analyst" position for a tv program called Slitscan; Laney has a rare gift that enables him to tease patterns out of seemingly random data and he is recruited by a Japanese company to come to Tokyo and perform some research on their most valuable asset -- a rock star named Rez. Meanwhile, Chia is sent to Tokyo by her friends in Rez's Seattle-based fan club to discover the truth about The Rumor -- that Rez intends to marry a software construct, an idoru called Rei Toei.

Without a close inspection of the text, the novel might appear energetic but thematically trite. The plot moves along at a brisk pace: trans-Pacific flights whisk our protagonists into a Japanese Wonderland, quick-cut flashbacks fill in their respective histories, malicious and unseen maneuvering keeps every last character on his or her toes. Gibson drops his customary tropes: seedy back-alley deals gone awry, a detailed but ultimately vague send-up of "cyberspace", a mischievous and emergent AI...

But this book has nothing to do with AI or cyberspace or seedy back-alley deals.

At its core, Idoru explores the proposition that intimacy is a function of immersion, of experience, of fully surrendering to the risks of engagement and that knowledge or facts or data by any name and in any quantity cannot bring affinity. The narrative contains a relatively early scene wherein Laney is subject to a monologue by Kathy Torrance (his boss at Slitscan); she goes on at length about "celebrity" as a natural resource, about how media and tabloids like Slitscan have corralled "celebrity" into a commodity that can be controlled and brokered. Taken out of context, the monologue appears to be a provocative and unambiguous statement about celebrity in and of itself. Examining the scene with the novel's thesis in mind, we begin to see what lies at the kernel of Kathy Torrance's soliloquy: how "celebrity" is a focal point for a broad knowledge about a person (or other object of affection/attention) that by definition cannot be fully experienced. "Celebrity" is data presented as intimacy -- the fine-grained details of some person's life presented to you in all their banal urgency, more fantasy than reality, ever out of reach, inevitably unable to satisfy your need to share and experience.

Consider Kathy Torrance's rant about celebrity as a mirror to Alison Shires and Laney's own back-story. As Laney reflects on Alison Shires' suicide, we begin to see these themes take shape. In her original context, Alison is presented to Laney as "all data"; she is little more than some fulcrum of collapsed transactions that swing back onto some celebrity target of Slitscan's. But as her imminent suicide becomes obvious to Laney through his "nodal apprehension", he becomes concerned about, even attached to her; he breaks through his own Fourth Wall and allows himself to become involved, to experience her face-to-face. He is there in her apartment for the shot that kills her. We can hear echoes of his investment, how the experience created an instantly intimate moment which he capsulizes as: "...the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world's steady accretion of data." The experience would be lost, buried under the steady stream of celebrity's telemetry, and he wonders how he can live with that outcome.

The novel is peppered with examples to underscore this proposition about intimacy:
* Consider that every bar, cafe, restaurant, etc. featured in the text is somehow themed and each theme is just data, each motif is hollow and empty -- the impression of something, its image, a copy or facsimile or interpretation but not the thing itself;
* Consider how Chia's story about her Sandbenders computer resonates on this chord, how she descrives the disposable shells of modern electronics as insufficient for people to make a connection with them, and how a "tribe" in Oregon humanized each computer through their artisanal cases;
* Consider Masahiko's tales of Walled City and how he continually asserts to Chia that it is "real" and not just a MUD, not just a website;
* Consider Blackwell's final affirmation to Laney, that Kathy Torrance will no longer threaten him, how they will "carve out this deep and meaningful and bloody unforgettable episode of mutual face-time", how they will have reached "very personal terms" -- the data, the facts are discarded, meaningless -- only the experience matters.

Throughout the narrative, there is a very keen sense that each character is desperately seeking something "real", something with which he or she can truly and intimately connect. Rez at one point blurts out: "Nothing like it [...] That physical thing." It is on those sentiments that the novel opens and again where it closes. We open on Laney in the aftershocks of just such a "physical thing" and Chia striking out to Tokyo in search of same. And we close on Rez and Rei Toei -- both symbolic of Kathy Torrance's "celebrity", different sides of that same coin -- discovering that their union cannot be completed without it, and daring to forge just such a path
April 30, 2008

Final Fantasy meets Second Life

Writing this review some 8 years after the book "Idoru" was written, you get the advantage of having some technologies catch up to a near-future novel. We don't have virtual meetings, yet, but, thanks to Second Life, we're close; all you need are the VR glasses, a Skype VoiP connection and you are there, man.
Thus, we have Gibson's 2nd installment of his "Bridge" trilogy where fourteen-year-old Chia Pet McKenzie of Seattle (the where-it's-at city of the mid-late 90's) log onto a virtual forum (Second Life) with her Lo/Rez fan club members to discuss the impending marriage between Rez (think Bono) and a computer character (think one of Final Fantasy's beautiful characters). Chia is "volunteered" to fly to Tokyo to investigate.
Ridiculous, no?
And then, in Tokyo, Colin Laney, a very likable and intelligent character who is hired away from his job at Slitscan as an information researcher (or Google surfer extraordinaire) who can somehow separate signal from noise in the wilderness of the Net and collate that info into what will happen next - as we see in "All Tomorrow's Parties", Gibson's third installment.
Lo/Rez's management hires Laney to suss out why Rez feels he has to "marry" Rei Toei, the "idoru" who is becoming Gibson's version of the holodeck doctor from Star Trek: Voyager and Data the android from "Star Trek, The Next Generation". Observing humanity, she grows smarter.
Events in the book run back and forth between Chia and Colin, until the two are drawn face-to-face in the last act of the book. Neither of them have much to do with each other, and so the story's rather thin - but, it's the breath-taking accuracy of Gibson's vision that is astonishing. As for nano-technology (there's a nanotech assembler involved), that seems to have been a hot thing for the last ten years, but right now, it's not as sexy as yakking via VR.
Most of the reviewers feel that to appreciate "All Tomorrow's Parties", you must first read "Idoru" (Japanese for "idol"). I won't disagree, but, it's not necessary. Gibson endlessly re-iterates the situation from "Idoru" in "ATP" enough so that you don't have to.
February 10, 2008

Not Free SF Reader

The music industry is a bit fake.

Not that that is something that will surprise a lot of people. A fair helping of biting satire here as a bloke in a band looks set to marry a computer generated pop star.

More media shenanigans as a bloke runs foul of his employer after uncovering dodgy goings on, and the fans of the band who has a member crazy enough to want to marry into the digerati sends someone to investigate.

3 out of 5

December 07, 2007

Virtual is Almost Real

Gibson's novel about a singer who decides to marry a computer-generated pop culture idol is a rather lightly-plotted science fiction tale with touches of sly humor. Chia Pet, one of the singer's young female fans, goes to Japan to see if the matrimonial rumors are true. His security chief hires a data investigator to find out who put the bizarre idea into the singer's head. Mixing virtual worlds ala Second Life, bizarre avatars, smuggling, and just a touch of nano technology, Gibson has turned out an amusing mix that fans of writers like Harry Harrison will love.
September 12, 2007

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