Review by Booklist Review
Has the future caught up with Gibson? His Neuromancer (1984) launched a subgenre, cyberpunk, that characteristically depicts a future full of outlandish technology and the chic, rundown ambience of the movie Blade Runner. Gibson foresaw computer hackers, computer viruses, artificial intelligence, and the ubiquity of the Internet; in Idoru, he adds nanotechnology, multi-user domains (MUDs), and holography to the mix. The rumor that Rez, of the phenomenally and perennially popular rock band Lo/Rez, plans to marry an idoru (a synthetic Japanese pop singer) prompts Lo/Rez fan club member Chia Pet McKenzie of Seattle to fly to the recently reconstructed, postearthquake Tokyo to meet with the chapter there and investigate. Concurrently, Lo/Rez's personal security hires net runner Colin Laney to determine whether the Russian Mafia is linked to the nuptials. Laney has the unique ability to ascertain obscure patterns in accumulated data derived from electronic transactions and other ephemera that an extremely digitized society records. Gibson remains on the cutting edge, but his vision does not now seem far-fetched. Indeed, often Idoru seems not to be set in the future at all. It resonates with startling realism as it presents a future not unlike the present, part hell and part paradise. (Reviewed Aug. 1996)0399141308Benjamin Segedin
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The founding father of cyberpunk again returns to the techno-decadent 21st century mapped in his other major works (Virtual Light, Neuromancer, etc.). As usual, Gibson offers a richly imagined tale that finds semi-innocents wading hip-deep into trouble. Colin Laney has taken a job in Japan to escape the revenge of his former employer, Slitscan, a kind of corporate gossip-mongerer on the Net that he has crossed out of scruples. Meanwhile, Chia Pet McKenzie is active in the fan clubs for Lo/Rez, a Japanese superstar rock duo; while visiting Japan to investigate some new rumors about the group, she is used to smuggle illegal nanoware to the Russian criminal underground. Both Laney and Chia get caught up in the intrigues swirling about the plans of Rez, one half of the band, to marry Rei Toei, an "idoru" (idol) who exists only in virtual reality. Gibson excels here in creating a warped but comprehensible future saturated with logical yet unexpected technologies. His settings are brilliantly realized, from high-tech hotel rooms and airplanes to the infamous Walled City of Kowloon. The pacing is slower than Virtual Light, but Gibson exhibits his greatest strength: intense speculation, expressed in dramatic form, about the near-term evolution and merging of cultural, social and technological trends, and how they affect character. Dark and disturbing, this novel represents no new departure for Gibson, but a further accretion of the insights that have made him the most precise, and perhaps the most prescient, visionary working in SF today. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Colin Laney has a gift very much in demand. He can see well-hidden secrets through "nodal points" in the digital wake of commerce. In the not-so-distant future, fame and fortune and their analogs, scandal and ruin, are the true binding agents in a fractured, ungovernable world. Fired from his television tabloid job for an indiscretion, Laney is hired by the manager of the superpopular band Lo/Rez to go to post-earthquake Tokyo and divine the meaning behind singer Lo's intention to marry an idorua sort of a semi-sentient hologram. In alternating chapters, Chia, deeply involved in the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club, picks up word of Lo's intentions over a computer network and is sent to investigate. On the way, she acts as the unwitting mule for a smuggler and winds up holding some very dangerous information. Though the plotting is weak and obvious, Gibson's writing is thick with atmosphere, dislocating the reader with a future that is both familiar and unsettling. Gibson's legion of fans will enjoy this fine sf thriller. For all fiction collections.Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Cyberspace and virtual-reality guru Gibson's new venture is set in the same near-future as Virtual Light (1993) and has at least one of the characters in common. ``Netrunner'' Colin Laney has an unusual ability to see ``nodal points,'' ordinarily imperceptible data associations. Indirectly, he's hired by scarred, giant Keith Alan Blackwell, Rez's fiercely protective security chief--Rez being the half-Irish singer of superstar band Lo/Rez. Blackwell is concerned that someone may be trying to manipulate his boss, Rez having expressed his determination to marry Rei Toei, a Japanese idoru--a computer personality-construct! From Seattle, meanwhile, 14-year-old Chia McKenzie is sent by her local Lo/Rez fan club to Japan to investigate a peculiar rumor about Rez and a certain idoru. On the plane she meets weird Maryalice, who dupes Chia into smuggling a dangerous package through customs--though when Maryalice starts fighting with her boyfriend Eddie, Chia flees with the package. Laney, unable to work with insufficient and impersonal data, insists on meeting Rez, whereupon he's captivated by Rei Toei. Eddie's Russian gangster friends demand their package, and assuming that Chia, Rez, and Laney are connected, hunt Chia. With violence occurring and worse to follow, only some nifty computer work by Laney and by Chia and her friends averts disaster; helpfully, Rex proposes to exchange the package for some real estate. Markedly more relaxed and cordial, and less aggressively high- tech, than hitherto--even the plotting's improved: highly approachable, engaging, and persuasive. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Rolling Stone; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
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