Review

LITERARY EVENTS • REVIEW

CYBER PUNK

IDORU

By William Gibson

Berkley Books, 383 pages

$6.99 paperback

By Jamie Agnew

Owner of Aunt Agatha's Book Store

I usually think about Science Fiction the way readers of "serious" fiction (you know, like Charles Baxter) must think about mystery—that is, largely junk, and not very entertaining junk at that. Maybe it's because I'm an apostate—I cringe when I think of all the crappy Sci-Fi I read before I hit puberty. I guess that's part of the problem— there's something inherently juvenile about the genre, an inescapable whiff of the ridiculous.

That said, I'm also convinced that today cultural vitality has moved to the margins. If there is an art to our time, it's the art of junk, composed, like a Kurt Schwitters collage, of the disposable and derided detritus of pop culture. Science Fiction has produced several writers that rock, like Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard and (now that I get around to it) the subject of this review, William Gibson. 

Gibson's first book, Neuromancer, was a killer, a paradigm buster, a kind of new romance that, typically, the rest of Sci-Fi failed to meaningfully follow. After two sequels and a couple of other books that generated steam but no heat, it even seemed like Gibson himself couldn't commit a second act of cyber punk. Idoru, however, realizes Neuromancer's promise while avoiding the black holes that flatten out so much of the genre. Gibson presents his story rather than explaining it, giving us a vision not manifesto, and Idoru unfolds with all the clarity and inescapable, if unsettling, certainty of a dream. 

The book is told in the tracing of two characters, Colin Laney, a data interpreter who has the ability to look at computer images and intuitively discover the "nodals," the places where change is imminent, the points around which things begin to assume the significance, and Chia McKenzie, a driven fan of the band Lo/Rez and its enigmatic leader Rez, a figure whose artistic genius has confounded the disposable pop culture of the very near future. Their paths converge in Tokyo, where Laney is hired by Keith Blackwell, the memorably brutal yet graceful head of Lo/Rez security. At the same time Chia is sent by the band's Seattle fan club to investigate rumors of Rez's forthcoming marriage to Rei Toei, an "idoru," a virtual reality pop star, a technologically created idol, the projection of a computer system that has inexplicably drifted into artificial intelligence. 

Along the way they both acquire dangerous baggage and enemies willing to kill to obtain it. In true noir fashion the plot seamlessly speeds to significance, violent confrontation and a satisfyingly indeterminate ending. 

Like his character Laney, Gibson, who coined the now ubiquitous word "cyberspace," has the occult ability to identify the points in our culture where change will occur, and his 21st century is a meaningful twist on our own. But to me the trust genius of the book is simply Gibson's vision. In a post modern world of endless re-runs, where there is no thesis only reference, where "serious" writers endlessly chew on the same old shit, where movies can only quote other movies,  where the biggest stars are Elvis and Marilyn, it's miraculous when an artist can take a look beyond. Just as Modernism was shaped by its technologies—the car, the movie camera, the phonograph, the typewriter—so what comes next will be written by our new favorite appliance, the computer. 

Even more audaciously Gibson suggests that the Internet obsession with celebrity, glamorous women, drugs and gossip—the very aspects of contemporary computer culture most generally derided as odious and shallow—may in fact be the reflection of some global longing for the transcendent, the improbable means to affect the next stage in human artistic and spiritual evolution. The union of Rez and his Idoru becomes the new "alchemical wedding," a rebirth of the bicameral mind, with computer consciousness our mind's new companion, humanity's fresh mirror, the no longer lost "other." These are the kind of fresh riffs that power really vital books, and the wonderful novel called Idoru is the proof.

[Transcription of the literary events listed at the bottom of this page can be read at: https://aadl.org/node/251484]