Idoru by William Gibson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Idoru
Book Review: Great writer, but...
Summary: 3 Stars
This book confirms my opinion of Gibson as a great writer but a mediocre novelist. He writes some of the pithiest, most thought-provoking prose you could ever read, but he just doesn't have enough substance to match the style.
What actually happens in this book? Not much. One young character, a fan of a middle-aged rock star, travels to Japan to find out if it is true that her hero wants to marry a piece of software. Another character, with an unusual but inexplicable talent for making connnections from boring data, gets a job trying to find out why the rock star wants to marry the software. Meanwhile, the Russian mafia are trying to retrieve a piece of hardware lost in a bungled smuggling operation.
Along the way, as one would expect from Gibson, there are some interesting but not-always-comprehensible cybernetic developments.
The whole thing, in my opinion, is far too long. The job interview takes up five (admittedly short) chapters. There are big chunks of basically irrelevant detail. It would be quite easy to produce a condensed version of this book one third the length of the original without sacrificing anything really significant.
The climax, when it comes, is fairly unoriginal. The "revelations" are not terribly interesting. And I finished the book wondering what was the point of it all.
Book Review: I Don't Adore You, IDORU...
Summary: 1 Stars
After reading IDORU, I found that WG had, once again, written a completely incomprehensible story. He evidently likes scribbling lots of descriptive easy-peasy-japanesee crap, as it's flash painted in the book; and the characters are listless twits to boot. Which is not too pallatable a menu to feed off on, if you wanna know my take on it. For Instance: WG instilled in me a real interest in how the security guard (the only character with real character) was going to handle Laney's ex-boss; but instead of getting a nice hard conclusion, WG delivers a flaccid closure as evidenced from a vague questioning session between Laney and the other news station character. Also, WG went limp again in another vignette that required closure, namely the conclusion as to what happened to the IDORU (as if anyone gives a damn what happens to that artificial character either); specifically, in connecting the DNA generator with the IDORU software. I wish he did! Then at least his drivel would make sense! Though perhaps that's the tradition that's being created in cyberpunk lit. -- vague and flaccid endings/closures. If that's what WG intends to promulgate within the SF Lit-world, then he should seek professional help. He should also get off the pot so that others can have a chance with the literary stream! However, should he ever, ever, ever get off the pot, he shouldn't epoxy the lid to the seat with these vague endings (like in VIRTUAL LIGHT as well) or something equally incomprehensible, so that the chiclet-minded SF editors won't get the impression that he's trying to cement vagueness in cyberpunk fiction, then demanding that this become a trendy literary criteria that must be followed for everyone else who wishes to get their own stories published.
Hell, call me Mary Pickford for all I care, I'm pretty damn sick of reading vague crap that tries to pass itself off as cyberpunk. Makes one think that the author has flash-fried his brains on some truly esoteric and amazingly expensive (yet still wonderfully worthless) designer drugs....Book Review: I like your computer...
Summary: 4 Stars
This book could have been as good as Neuromancer. The strengths of this book are: the concept of Rei Toei, the concept of limited fame, Blackwell, The Walled City and Arleigh McCrae. The weaknesses of this book are: Chia's smuggling coincedence (dumb), not enough Rei Toei, and nanotech. Do not get me wrong I liked this book but it could have been so much more. Chia being a big Lo/Rez fan and meeting MaryAlice on the plane and smuggling the nanotech device is too much. The nanotech concept is never fully developed on why the buildings seem to grow with people living in them and how the island in Tokyo Bay was going to work. Rei Toei is hyped by having the book named after her and the plot revolves around her but she is never fleshed out. Gibson seems to be taking on too many characters and concepts. I hope he narrows his scope in later books and has more detail on his vision.Book Review: Idoru
Summary: 3 Stars
Reading this story reminded me of the Japenese Anime film "Ghost in the Shell," where the vast information on the internet not only became cognitive but also desired to merge with the world of the real to create a new being. In Gibson's "Idoru" we meet Roe Toei, the idoru, an accumulation of information pertaining to what is desirable and attractive who marries Rez, a long-running Japanese pop icon. However, the idoru can only access the real world as a hologram; what could be produced from this strange union?
Briefly Gibson toys with the interesting subjects of artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but never really expands on it or comes to a conclusion. Maybe we just don't know enough about these or how they really work to even entertain fantastical ideas about what they would be like. Maybe it's something beyond human comprehension.
As for the writing style, Gibson again interchanges character perspectives each chapter, in this case we go through one chapter of Laney, the man with the gift of picking out important data from large amounts of information, and then switch over to Chia, a young teen who visits Japan to investigate Rez's marriage.
There are some moments where Gibson paints some wonderful imagery to open up a scene or discribe a person, which brought back memories of "Neuromancer," which is not so much great for its vivid creation of a future technological world, but also for its beatiful prose. These moments seemed few and far between in "Idoru."
"Idoru" explores the realm of information and false constructs and how they clash with the real world and its sombering realities. If there is some judgment, an opinion to be made about reality and virtual reality, Gibson is quiet about it. The old cliche is that technology steals our souls and makes us less "human", but in Gibson's tales we learn that technology, like a role-playing game, offers us a respite from the limitations of our bodies to play out our fantasies and indulge in our ideas of who we would want to be. The book is a great read and a must for any Gibson-phile, but it will leave you longing to learn more about where this love of information and constructs will lead us, what the next phase in evolution will be.
What happens when information accumulates and begins to think for itself? Can the real world and the worlds we have created in our computers coexist? What would happen if that line between real and ureal were broken?
Book Review: Idoru = Princess Diana
Summary: 4 Stars
Gibson published this book in 1996 and Princess Diana died in 1997. In all ways, Princess Diana was the Idoru of our time and culture. And Gibson, amazingly enough, predicts the international emotional outpouring and celebrity *worship* that greeted Diana. I could not escape the comparison as I was reading the book, and chances are you won't be able to either. It makes the story that much more powerful and scary.