The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Idoru by William Gibson
Lance Olsen

William Gibson. Idoru. Putnam, 1996. 292 pp. $24.95.

It’s been well over a decade since William Gibson blasted into heavy rotation on the alternative literary charts with his cyberpunk classic Neuro-mancer (1984), surely the novel for which he’ll be remembered. With each successive endeavor—with the possible exception of The Difference Engine (1991), his fiery collaboration with Bruce Sterling based on the premise that Charles Babbage invented the computer a good century before the actual fact—he’s become less willing to take narrative chances, further committed to mainstreaming his fiction, and Idoru continues this trajectory.

Idoru feels stripped down compared to Neuromancer. It is less stylistically textured, less surreal, and less shaped by Gibson’s early visionary consciousness. Like his previous novel, Virtual Light (1993), it exhibits a more pronounced if slightly flimsy comic edge and a remarkably less-pronounced presence of cyberspace, the concept Gibson explored with such dazzle in his first novel that critics began to convince themselves he actually invented it. Even the haunting shadows that permeate the geographies of that earlier work have been shunted aside by the bright colorful light which floods every corner of Idoru’s world, pushing back the night and, in a sense, the darkly human with it.

We are in familiar terrain in Idoru. In many ways a companion to Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), fame has become all famed out here. The media has generated all it can, used it up, so there’s just not enough of it to go around anymore—except for Rez, the fabulously wealthy rock’n’roll star planning to marry, much to his publicity machine’s chagrin, a mesmerizing Japanese “idoru,” or idol-singer, who exists solely as a personality construct inthe electronic beyond. An intersecting plotline reminiscent of the one in Count Zero (1986) draws two seemingly unrelated characters—Chia Pet McKenzie, a fourteen-year-old member of the Seattle chapter of Rez’s band’s fan club, and Colin Laney, a researcher for a tabloid TV show whose job it is to hunt for patterns of information that accrue around and ultimately define certain individuals—toward this narrative center by means of a nano-assembler MacGuffin that echoes those magic glasses in Virtual Light.

And yet, for all the déjà vu we feel reading this novel, from the setting (the Japan-as-near-future we saw in Neuromancer) to several of the characters (both Rydell, the goofy security man, and Yamazaki, the existential sociologist, return from Virtual Light for curtain calls), there’s something utterly addictive about it. It goes down like a bag of shiny gumdrops. Part of this has to do with its demon-speed momentum built around masterfully crafted chapter hooks. But there’s more. Gibson has learned to create a real emotional depth to his characters—especially Chia in this case—that’s honestly moving, and he has a knock-out ear for dialogue. Too, he’s a master of detail: the towers in Tokyo grown by nanotechnology that are “like watching a candle melt, but in reverse”; the drug that makes people into stalkers of public figures.

And it’s these details which point to the true strength of Gibson’s project: he has always had his finger on the epinephrinized pulse of our postmodern culture, and has always been able to cast our fractured obsessions and fears into shockingly intelligent forms that make us see our sociohistorical position as if we’ve never seen it before. In Idoru, he has touched the flashpoint where our identity has dissolved into bright pixels generated by digital systems we no longer quite comprehend. He’s caught the instant where our skin has evaporated into holographic light, smudging toward the horizon of unknowability. [Lance Olsen]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Idoru by William Gibson Lance Olsen William Gibson. Idoru. Putnam, 1996. 292 pp. $24.95. It’s been well over a decade since William Gibson blasted into heavy rotation on the alternative literary charts with his cyberpunk classic Neuro-mancer (1984), surely the novel for which he’ll be remembered. With each successive endeavor—with the possible exception of The Difference Engine (1991), his fiery collaboration with Bruce Sterling based on the premise that Charles Babbage invented the computer a good century before the actual fact—he’s become less willing to take narrative chances, further committed to mainstreaming his fiction, and Idoru continues this trajectory. Idoru feels stripped down compared to Neuromancer. It is less stylistically textured, less surreal, and less shaped by Gibson’s early visionary consciousness. Like his previous novel, Virtual Light (1993), it exhibits a more pronounced if slightly flimsy comic edge and a remarkably less-pronounced presence of cyberspace, the concept Gibson explored with such dazzle in his first novel that critics began to convince themselves he actually invented it. Even the haunting shadows that permeate the geographies of that earlier work have been shunted aside by the bright colorful light which floods every corner of Idoru’s world, pushing back the night and, in a sense, the darkly human with it. We are in familiar terrain in Idoru. In many ways a companion to Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), fame has become all famed out here. The media has generated all it can, used it up, so there’s just not enough of it to go around anymore—except for Rez, the fabulously wealthy rock’n’roll star planning to marry, much to his publicity machine’s chagrin, a mesmerizing Japanese “idoru,” or idol-singer, who exists solely as a personality construct inthe electronic beyond. An intersecting plotline reminiscent of the one in Count Zero (1986) draws two seemingly unrelated characters—Chia Pet McKenzie, a fourteen-year-old member of the Seattle chapter of Rez’s band’s fan club, and Colin Laney, a researcher for a tabloid TV show whose job it is to hunt for patterns of information that accrue around and ultimately define certain individuals—toward this narrative center by means of a nano-assembler MacGuffin that echoes those magic glasses in Virtual Light. And yet, for all the déjà vu we feel reading this novel, from the setting (the Japan-as-near-future we saw in Neuromancer) to several of the characters (both Rydell, the goofy security man, and Yamazaki, the existential sociologist, return from Virtual Light for curtain calls), there’s something utterly addictive about it. It goes down like a bag of shiny gumdrops. Part of this has to do with its demon-speed momentum built around masterfully crafted chapter hooks. But there’s more. Gibson has learned to create a real emotional depth to his characters—especially Chia in this case—that’s honestly moving, and he has a knock-out ear for dialogue. Too, he’s a master of detail: the towers in Tokyo grown by nanotechnology that are “like watching a candle melt, but in reverse”; the drug that makes people into stalkers of public figures. And it’s these details which point to the true strength of Gibson’s project: he has always had his finger on the epinephrinized pulse of our postmodern culture, and has always been able to cast our fractured obsessions and fears into shockingly intelligent forms that make us see our sociohistorical position as if we’ve never seen it before. In Idoru, he has touched the flashpoint where our identity has dissolved into bright pixels generated by digital systems we no longer quite comprehend. He’s caught the instant where our skin has evaporated into holographic light, smudging toward the horizon of unknowability. [Lance Olsen]

Search the full text of our books: