Idoru - William Gibson

This is one of the best book I've ever read.Idoru is deep, virtual/real, and it's firmly intertwined with my own ideas of our near-future.The book is all about virtual realities-- cities in the cracks of the computer systems, virtual stars who are becoming real, Kafka theme bars, and fans who meet in virtual clubhouses with constructed images. I said it was about the realities themselves, but really it seems to be about how the characters struggle and cope with the layers around them.I found the charactrers all well defined and appealing, especially Laney, a sort of everyman who ends up in the middle of a lot of weird stuff. And of course, there's ...

Another masterful tale by Gibson, set in the USA and Japan some time in the 21st century. Following his novel Virtual Light, several characters reoccur, including the security guard Rydell who sets researcher Laney towards a job with the superstar Rez. Gibson again uses several separated characters, who meet at the climax of the story. Chia Mckenzie is a teenage fan of the Lo-Rez group, sent by her fan-group to Tokyo to investigate rumours of his marriage to virtual singer Rei Toei. Rei is the Idoru of the title, an artificial personality created by promoters, but become so advanced that she reaches consciousness. There is a supporting cast from ruthless media ...

In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, the newly recreated Tokyo looks different. It's a place where ghosts shimmy in the periphery of your vision, a place where high rise buildings shapeshift like mirages in the horizon, a place where half-dreamt dreams scurry in the neon fog. You know you're in Gibson territory. The past master of cyberpunk ( he must be sick of the terminology by now!) creates a original fable for the digital age. It is a musing on what's real and what's not. A commentary on all of us who lust after Lara Croft, who fall in love with pixel vixens. Colin Laney is netrunner, a cyber tec who instinctively knows ...