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    Idoru
    Idoru
    Idoru
    Audiobook9 hours

    Idoru

    Written by William Gibson

    Narrated by John McLain

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature . . .

    Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the "signature" an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful-to certain people.

    Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She's fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out.

    Rei Toei is the idoru-the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger . . .
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 22, 2018
    ISBN9781977374608
    Idoru
    Author

    William Gibson

    William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is credited with having coined the term “cyberspace,” and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed. His other novels include All Tomorrow’s Parties, Idoru, Virtual Light, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with his wife and two children.

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    Reviews for Idoru

    3.5/5

    1,330 ratings25 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A fast-paced, exciting story about the intersections of realities and identity. This is also one of the rare books that gets the mindset behind fandom. An impressive piece of cyberpunk.
    • 3/5
      Gibson can be somewhat confusing at times, but the story moves well and the complexity of that story can be addicting...a bit difficult for me to keep track of all the characters at times. I suppose if I could, I'd give it a 2.5.
    • 4/5
      Great story, narration uneven — levels from chapter to chapter, occasional character voice inconsistencies. Overall, though, completely listenable.
    • 3/5
      Plus another half a star. Might have made the full 4 stars if I had not had a week's break just before finishing the book. Found I had lost track of most of the characters - which was a shame as had been really involved up to then. So my fault. Also I nearly cried when the book finished without more involvement with the nano builders.... or did it? I love the open ended writing where neither place nor characters are quite pinned down.
    • 4/5
      Idoru is the second novel in the Bridge Trilogy, following up Virtual Light's California with a story set in Tokyo. Idoru introduces a new story arc, and new characters, rather than continuing anything from VL. The series arc plays out in the background, especially in the first two books. Virtual Light's Shapely background story supplemented here with the Lo/Rez story, and with Laney's background at DatAmerica subsidiary SlitScan. The shift is from biological events on society (pandemic) to celebrity events and the power of social media (not termed that). There remains a pronounced emphasis upon the haves / have nots in these societies. Where the Bay Bridge served as setting in VL, and events involved a criminal class striving to intervene in an informal economy, in Idoru the spotlight moves to a formal economy of producers / consumers of "reality TV" (also not termed that). The criminal class bridges both worlds.Tokyo rebuilding is well underway if incomplete, implying different seismic events from the Little Big One which hit San Francisco. Nanotech construction has been employed in Tokyo, and Gibson's description of Laney's reaction to observing it first-hand suggests this technology is not embraced by the public, whether American or Japanese. That nanotech assemblers are controlled technology (much as fission technology, armaments, and chemical technology are for us) further ratchets up the intrigue and tension.Gibson's Walled City hacker collaborative and the Zona Rosa virtual gangs are extensions of VL's Republic of Desire and the influence of cyberspace. Idoru is the first of Gibson's books to integrate virtual reality and data macro-signatures, and pattern recognition will predominate his later work.//synopsis | When Rez declares his intent to marry Rei Toei, a digital celebrity, ripples are felt in corporate pools as much as they are among celebrity watchers. Lo/Rez are known as trendsetters and experimentalists in music and video, but this move leads Rez's own security detail to worry he's been manipulated. Colin Laney is hired away from SlitScan, where his talent for pattern recognition within celebrity datasets may be of use in determining whether Rez is compromised, and by whom. Chia Mackenzie travels from Seattle to Tokyo on behalf of her Chapter of the Lo/Rez Fan Club, seeking to clarify rumours of Rez's intended marriage. Their separate inquiries end up catching the attention of a variety of criminal actors and casting ripples of their own.
    • 4/5
      I think it's very telling - and promising, that this guy who thinks he can predict an apocalyptic future for Earth where 80% of people are killed has had at least the first part of his dystopian fantasy fall at the first hurdle. Just because you got it right on a few obvious ones - Cyberspace, virtual reality, reality TV, etc., doesn't guarantee that kind of thinking is going to take you much further. The future is a lot less SF than people think. If you want my prediction (you don’t), we can expect a future that is less technology focused and more experience focused. Experience is ultimately what we look to technology to deliver to us in the first place, and technology is a vital part of delivering to us pleasurable, desirable and vital experiences, but it also has the power to take away our potential to experience as well, and it does so slowly and incrementally in a way that we don't spot, but we can always break out of that cycle. It's hard to break from that cycle as an individual, easier to do it as a group, and easiest still where the cultural hubs and establishment instruments of your country come to understand the need to make such a break, and move to facilitate it, The latter point is the seemingly insurmountable obstacle, because you can't get people to act or vote against what they see to be their best interests, and the strength of human development energy and potential that is driven towards the techno-dystopia predicted by Gibson is vast and all-encompassing, but it can be overcome with the correct approach.One thing that humans excel at, and for which we require no technological assistance whatsoever (although a modicum of it certainly helps), is creating experiences. There's very little we do better, and very little we enjoy better, than creating experiences for ourselves and one another, than employing our imagination to turn something of low intrinsic value into something of infinite intrinsic value. The best works of literature can be, and indeed some of them were, written by people with nothing but their passion, drive and creativity. Even of those without widely recognised talents and skills, everyone has the capacity at the bare minimum to make themselves and others in their lives happy through their attitudes and relationships with one another. Simple and consistent acts of kindness and care to one another can produce a greater experience than any piece of technology. This is not an anti-tech Luddite argument by any means either.There are technologies, often placed beyond the reach of the individual, not for economic reasons but for behavioural ones, because of what it would mean for the world if they were to penetrate the mainstream in any meaningful sense. There exist, already today, and more so in the minds of innovators and potential innovators, technologies so brilliant and so powerful, that we practically - and sometimes literally - forbid ourselves from using them because of what the dire implications of doing so recklessly would be. We forbid ourselves these technologies for the same reasons that we forbid ourselves the use of nuclear and chemical weapons, of psychotropic drugs, and in most civilised countries, guns. These are technologies - present and theoretical - which if abused or misused have the potential to make things worse, not better, but if used responsibly and treated with the proportionate degree of care and respect that all dangerous technology deserves, they may be utilised to the great benefit of all. Consider this as a simple, hypothetical example: For somewhere in the region of 1000 Euros, I could construct an entertainment system - of PA speakers and subwoofers, mixing desks for bands and record decks for DJs, capable of meaningfully serving the needs of a thousand people, a thousand times over, for 10 hours at a time. So 0.001 Euros per person or 0.0001 per hour of use. Of course electricity supply has to be factored in, but for a high efficiency 5,000 Watt peak system, after fairly averaging out the real world power levels (average levels), we're not looking at more than 6 kilowatt hours for the event, so about a quid's worth of electric for those 1000 people, for 10 hours. Gibson is great at hypothesizing all this in novel form.
    • 3/5
      This is set in roughly the same cyberpunk world as Neuromancer, but the style is more subtle and complex, which I must confess means less accessible for me. It occurs in the highly technologized Japan of this world, in which Idoru is a young woman who is said to be purely a computer construct, but seems to have all the characteristics of a very attractive human woman.
    • 2/5
      Not my favorite William Gibson book. Unlike his other works, it did toward moving me to think of the world and experience in new ways.
    • 4/5
      This is the second volume of Gibson's "Bridge Trilogy" and takes place in a dystopian near future in which Tokyo had recently suffered a huge earthquake but has been largely rebuilt using a new nanotechnology that few people seem properly to understand. Against this background thousands of adoring fans are amazed to hear that aging rock star Rez, Sino-Celtic leader of the stellar act Lo/Rez, announces that he is going to marry Rei Toei. All very well, until one realises that Rei Toei is an "idoru" - a hologram, or data-construct.Appalled by this news, Chia Mackenzie, and avid fan from Seattle, is sent by her fellow groupies to investigate. While checking in to her flight she meets Maryalice, a slightly mentally dislocated fading beauty who is travelling back to her wannabe gangster boyfriend Edie, who is striving to become "a face" in the post-'quake Tokyo underworld. Unbeknownst to Chia, Maryalice conceals something in her luggage.Meanwhile Laney, an internet researcher with almost mystical abilities to sniff out obscure data connections, has been hired by the Lo/Rez organisation to manage press coverage of Rez's bizarre announcement. As the novel progresses we start to learn more about Laney's previous employment with the sinister Slitscan media corporation.The novel proceeds with the two subplots unfolding in alternating chapters, before the two threads are drawn together in a dazzling climax.All of the usual Gibson characteristics are there - complex internet architecture, alarmingly accurate prescience about technological developments, and a complex mixture of sympathetic and repulsive characters.Frighteningly plausible!
    • 4/5
      More than ten years before Hatsune Miku was created Gibson had the idea for Rei Toei. Idoru actually focuses less on the titular character than I expected and this was something of a disappointment. I was hoping Gibson would continue to develop his ideas of sentient AI, a theme which ran through his Sprawl trilogy, but that's not really the focus here. Instead, the novel focuses more on the idea and nature of celebrity and the power of the media to shape that. Again, Gibson might have been ahead of the curve here. These themes, plus a return to that cyberpunk staple locale, Japan (rebuilt after a quake via nanotechnology), make Idoru a very interesting novel. As one other reviewer below mentioned, perhaps this book is the "pivotal" Gibson novel - it mixes the old themes and locations with the idea of pattern recognition, a concept Gibson would more fully explore in his next trilogy.This abundance of ideas, some of it very on the mark, some of it not, makes for great reading. However, one problem I have with the book is how incidental our main characters feel. I was a little disappointed with how often the story seemed to move around them, rather than said characters being the driving forces of the action. Certainly, the two leads are our eyes into this world, but at times I did start to wonder if they were really necessary to the story and if events couldn't have played out without them.But overall this is a very good book, one of Gibson's better ones in my opinion. Its ideas are sharp and still relevant to today and the writing is more clear and precise than in previous books too. If the main characters felt slightly more important to the story (and this review ignores the good supporting cast) I'd give it four stars but, as it is, I feel have to be strict and knock half-a-star off.
    • 4/5
      I think of this as maybe the "pivotal" Gibson novel? The one to go to if you want both immersive VR landscapes AND meditations on fashion and celebrity. Good stuff.
    • 5/5
      A thematic sequel to 'Virtual Light'; although the action does not follow on from the earlier novel, two of the protagonists from that work - Rydell and Yamazaki - appear in this novel. Rydell is a secondary character, unlike the previous book; Yamazaki is shown here on his home territory and plays a far more central role in the story.We are in the usual cyberpunk milieu here - drugs, alcohol, sex and consumer electronics, with heavy side orders of organised crime and violence. The story is more engaging, as there are new characters who we follow quite closely and who are rather more sympathetic than previous Gibson protagonists. Again, for a novel written in 1996 the setting and society is very prescient, though Gibson didn't foresee recorded music passing so quickly away from a physical format as it has, whilst nanotechnology hasn't moved quite as fast in the real world as it has in Gibson's, nor have hand-crafted computers become quite such a geek accessory as here. But these are minor objections; after all, science fiction does not predict, and Gibson never said how far into the future his novels are set; pitch this as 2020 or thereabouts and it may look more accurate a picture of the future thsn it does now. "Virtual Light" could be mistaken for a contemporary novel; this book couldn't (yet), but it is set recognisably in the world we will soon inhabit.The style is very telegraphic; there are a lot of sentences without verbs, which usually irritates me, but here it seems to be deliberately done for effect, rather than displaying the incompetance of the author or their editor.
    • 5/5
      Another cracker by Gibson, different from the brilliant Virtual Light, but paving the way for a discussion closer to the terms of his previous work. Excellent read.
    • 4/5
      Living in post-quake Japan (and having done so since well before the quake) I find Gibson's imagined post-quake Japan to be a fascinating and stimulating place. Idoru contains some fascinating characters (the bodyguard being larger than life in all ways) and a plot and setting with which I can empathize.
    • 3/5
      William Gibson is one of my favorite authors of all time, and so I hold this book to a slightly higher standard than I would otherwise. It's a fine read- it doesn't lag and the style is as good as it gets, but Gibson has written better. There are two main characters, Laney and Chia, and I found the latter to be much more interesting than the former. For some I think it would be the other way around, but there's a definite lack of balance between the two storylines.
    • 5/5
      Alison Shires, glimpsed first as animated headshots, five months into his time at Slitscan, had been an rather ordinarily attractive girl murmuring her stats to imagined casting directors, agents, someone, anyone.Kathy Torrance had watched his face, as he watched the screen. "'Babed out' yet, Laney? allergic reaction to cute? First symptoms are a sort of underlying irritation, a resentment, a vague but persistent feeling that you're being gotten at, taken advantage of . . . "The teenagers in this book are totally at home on the net. Fourteen-year-old Chia is a member of the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club, whose fellow fangirls send her to Japan to stay with a member of the Tokyo chapter and try to find out the truth behind the rumours that rock start Rez is planning to marry an idoru, a virtual singer who is projected as a hologram and does not actually exist. Quantitative analyst Laney, who has a talent for finding nodes of relevant information among the undifferentiated mass of data on the net, is also in Tokyo having been hired by Lo/Rez's management to investigate the same thing. Chia finds herself in big trouble before she even gets off the plane, while Laney's previous employers, the producers of a muckraking TV show about celebrities called Slitscan, haven't finished with him yet .In this book, the equivalent of The Bridge is the The Walled City, a virtual copy of the Walled City of Kowloon, an online community set apart from the net, which you can't visit without an invitation and where the rules of the net do not apply. The nanotech buildings of the real Tokyo that are mentioned in "Virtual Light" are really quite odd and I can see why people who aren't used to them find them unnerving.If anything I liked this even more than "Virtual Light", as it goes into more depth about the consequences of the new virtual reality technology on various groups in society, such as fangirls, unsociable teenage boys and the criminal underworld.
    • 4/5
      End-of- 21st century Tokyo. Three interconnected lives.The story."Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the "signature" an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful - to certain people.Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She's fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out.Rei Toei is the idoru - the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger." That's basically the plot. If you think that sounds interesting you're going to love it. If that's not your kind of book, don't bother. But the book was not just about the plot. Gibson said that Colin Laney's ability to "identify nodal points" and find patterns in seemingly non-related data is similar to the author's own ability to "predict" the future based on the present. "Laney’s node-spotter function is some sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do. There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process." Now that is what I loved most about Idoru. Every single thing that happens in this book, even all the things that don't happen, that merely exist, that just are - the bits and pieces that constitute this world - are so believable. Every new element of this universe Gibson has created feels instantly real. You will exclaim, over and over "But of course the future's going to be like this!" And because the future in this book is not so distant - merely at the end of the present century - you can identify along with Gibson the first signs of what is to come in the world around you. It's not something imaginary, it's here already. This is not some figment of one brilliant/lunatic author's imagination - this must be how things will be for our children's children, right? Loved the story, loved the characters and loved the technology. There are also many popular culture references, which are always a plus in my book. (For example, the protagonist goes to a Franz Kafka-themed club, where each room is decorated according to a different story of Kafka's) Only two little warnings if you plan on reading Idoru. One: some paragraphs might be tricky at first, usually because you're not familiar with the equipment introduced or with the invented terms for the new technologies. Go back to them if necessary, don't skip things or you might miss out on important story elements. Two: a fascinating part of the book was, for me, the description of the new gadgets and apparatuses, products of the scientific progress that has been achieved in the last decades of the century; how computers will look in the near-future, what will they be able to do, how software will evolve, how the music industry or the different companies will use this technology, how advertisements will be made, etcetera. For me, being a music freak, writing for a music blog online, not being able to live without my laptop, loving to try out new software, constantly downloading the latest updates for pc programs, and appreciating pop culture references, this book combined all my interests. Which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. If you have no interest in all these things mentioned, then you're probably not going to love the book. You might appreciate the writer's talent or might enjoy the plot twists or (what look like, but don't feel like) sci-fi elements, but I don't think you're going to love it. I described it the best I could. Now just ask yourself: are you a computer/music nerd?
    • 3/5
      Typical Gibson. Excellent capture of the cyberpunk zeitgeist, a plotline that is a little weaker.
    • 3/5
      I have never been a massive SF fan, but I really really enjoyed this book.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating look at the future, written by a master of the genre.
    • 3/5
      Cyber-fiction look at the near future where the queen of pop is computer generated. Inventive story lines that are a good 15 20 years ahead of hollywood.
    • 4/5
      When you read this book you gradually realize that the main character is an avatar. This book predicts the future of the internet, the future of us, in exactly the same way Gibson did with Neuromancer, in which he predicted the internet itself (coining the words "the matrix").
    • 3/5
      i'm not a gibson fan, but i liked this anyway.
    • 4/5
      I picked up Idoru after five years of not reading science fiction, having exhausted my willingness to deal with the techno bits of the genre; admittedly I was reading lots of space exploration type books. I emerged from the book as if drugged. Gibson's hypnotic writing explodes the reader into moral issues as good science fiction should. This book also brings to mind Murakami's work but I found it more accessible.
    • 4/5
      This was a great read for a long car trip. Although it's ten years old and set in the not-so-distant future, Gibson gets so much right that it still rings true. [2006-01-19]