Idoru
William Gibson
Viking hbk, £16.00/trd pbk £9.99
In his introduction to Crash, JG Ballard meditates on the position and status of science fiction in the contemporary world:
Science and technology multiply around us... To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages or we remain mute.
Science fiction, ‘a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology’, can provide us with such a language. Although written in the mid seventies, Ballard’s argument is probably truer today than it was 20 years ago. Sf, particularly cyberpunk sf, has become the dominant discourse, the frame of reference, the conceptual, cartographic and theoretical context in and through which we define and describe, analyse and critique contemporary society and culture. As such, sf is no longer simply an ‘imaginative response to science and technology’, it’s a cognitive, intellectual and intuitive response to an ever more scientised and technologised world.
To return to Ballard again:
We live inside an enormous [sf] novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent reality.
Well, not so much invent reality but, as we’ve seen, construct a language, a rhetoric, an imaginary by which we might come to understand reality.
Sf, then, is a serious business. And (so-called) cyberpunk sf more serious than most. Social theorist Douglas Kellner has argued that cyberpunk ‘can be read as a sort of social theory’, a cognitive mapping of the contemporary landscape and of future trends. The late Timothy Leary, never one to miss a beat, suggested that cyberpunk
produced nothing less than the underlying myth, the core legend, of the next stage of human evolution.
A very serious business indeed, then.
Which is where William Gibson enters, centre stage. For Gibson, the man himself, his thought, speech and work, is for many the central figure in these discourses around sf, cyberpunk and what we might call technoculture or cybertheory. For Sandy Stone Gibson’s oeuvre, Neuromancer especially, marks a division between socio-cultural eras ‘based upon different modes of communication’. Neuromancer, she suggests, ‘crystallised a new community’; it worked as a core, founding text and mythos, bringing together a variety of individuals and groups, providing them with what she describes as an ‘imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community’ that grounded ‘the possibility of a new kind of social interaction’. Put simply, Gibson’s short stories and novels constructed nothing less than a site for the emergence of new subcultures and new social and cultural works. As such, the writer is figured as a guru, a master of thought, the founder of a discourse. Indeed so important is the name as a source and reference in cyber-thought and techno-speech that one gets the feeling that if Gibson had not existed it would have been necessary to create him...as an artificial and virtual personality, of course.
The publication of Idoru, then, is an event. While neither as profound or original as his earlier work, particularly the so-called ‘Sprawl Trilogy’, it continues, develops and expands on some of the themes introduced in Virtual Light. In particular, it reaffirms the author’s increasing sceptisism towards things cyber, a scepticism that was actually present in the trilogy but which got rather lost amid the hype and hyperbole. Idoru is a satire, albeit a remarkably subtle and gentle one. One senses, incidentally, the faint, even ghostly traces of a certain Mr Pynchon haunting the margins of its pages, barely tangible, frustratingly insubstantial. In particular, Idoru satirises contemporary pop culture -- the media and entertainment industry, fame, celebrity, fandom (some great stuff on the pathology of the fan club).
The plot, which if I’m not mistaken runs uncannily like a rewriting of Neuromancer, concerns the efforts of an artificial intelligence, a personality constructure, a glorified software agent, the idoru, Rei Toei, a virtual pop star, a simulation, an image, an audio track, to know and become herself. To do this she will marry Rez, one half of LoRez, a long-lived rock band, much to the consternation of Rez’s minders and adoring fans... this plot, satirical in itself, suggests how far Gibson has come from the Sprawl.
Much of the joy of the novel resides in the details, the meditations on the nature of a postindustrial, postmodern, mediated and simulated social milieu. For example, one of the novel’s main protagonists is Laney, a researcher and data collector for the SlitScan media organisation (a kind of hyperreal metatabloid, somewhere between The Sun, Celebrity Nudes and schlock TV). Laney’s a channel surfer, a waverider, a station zapper, with a short attention span, who is an ‘intuitive fisher of patterns of information...a dowser, a cybernetic waterwitch’. Intuitively, magically, he can browse the info-gestalts in data banks and, by finding the node point, a strange attractor, uncover the scandals in celebrities lives. He’s kind of like Case from Neuromancer, a console cowboy of sorts who thieves the horrors and disasters from people’s lives; the hacker as tabloid journalist, you might say. It’s in these thoughts on data and information, its relations with the subjects lived experience and actual life that Idoru is at its most interesting. In a sense Gibson’s offering an update of a Foucauldian panoptican: the lives of the individual citizen and subject are constantly open to surveillance and intervention through the traces they leave in cyberspace. In Gibson’s near future, the life of an individual is entirely open, ever present (albeit virtually); s/he can have no secrets, every action and gesture can be known by the data it leaves behind.