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Idoru
Idoru | William Gibson
11 posts | 21 read | 5 to read
2lst 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 not, he is careful to point out, a voyeur. He is an intuitive fisher of patterns of information, the "signature" a particular individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the interesting (read: dangerous) bits. Which makes him very 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 beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. The idoru. And Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that brought Chia to Tokyo. But the things that bother Rez are not the things that bother most people. Is something different here, in the very nature of reality? Or is it that something violently New is about to happen? It's possible the idoru is as real as she wants or needs to be--or as real as Rez desires. When Colin Laney looks into her dark eyes, trying hard to think of her as no more than a hologram, he sees things he's never seen before. He sees how she might break a man's heart.And, whatever else may be true, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger.
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quote
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

Lancey noticed something then that he knew from his encounters with celebs at Slitscan: that binary flicker in his mind between image and reality, between the mediated face and the face there in front of you. He'd noticed how it always seemed to speed up, that alternation, until the two somehow merged, the resulting composite becoming your new idea of the person.

quote
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convulsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.

quote
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene [of the Western World exclusive club], had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine...).

quote
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

'Real estate was baroque, here, before the quake; now it's more like occult.'

quote
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

'But you know [Rez]? You knew him before [this idoru thing hit]?'
'He's the navel of the world I work in, Laney. That has a way of making people unknowable.'

quote
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

'[T]heir secret was that they'd never cleaned the kettle. In fact, they never stopped cooking the soup. It was the same seafood soup they had been selling for fifty years, but it was never the same, because they added fresh ingredients every day, depending on what was available. [Lo of Rez/Lo] said that's what his career as a musician felt like, and he liked that about it.'

quote
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

'What *are* the nodal points?'
'It's like seeing things in clouds. Except the things you see are really there.'
She put her sake down. 'Yamazaki promised me you weren't crazy.'
'It's not crazy. It's something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern recognition
...If I enter a specific area, I don't get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It's got to be *relational. *'

blurb
tokorowilliamwallace
Idoru | William Gibson

Wonderfully conceptual associative broaching of topics, with the apt atmosphere of a chewing-gum-themed unpopular bar. I haven't read this in over a year since I moved from Baltimore, but I have confirmation this is definitely a city/nightlife/bar/jazz club/rainy day-with-whiskey kind of atmospheric read.

blurb
Anton
Idoru | William Gibson
post image

Finally have bookshelves up in the new place!

review
kirylin
Idoru | William Gibson
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Mehso-so

Next up in The Bridge Trilogy - Idoru. I feel like I can see seeds of what eventually became The Peripheral here. #readinglog #sciencefiction #cyberpunk

review
Harkaway
Idoru | William Gibson
Pickpick

Just finished re-reading this for the first time in years, and now have to do the whole Bridge sequence. Riveting, classic Gibson.

10 likes2 stack adds