blog.doomoire.comAnywhere Out of the World | The Mysteries of the Doomoire

Anywhere Out of the World The Mysteries of the Doomoire Menu Home A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb” January 6, 2013 ~ mvdoom ~ 13,219 Comments Idoru is a return to William Gibson’s stylish preoccupation with dense cityscapes, something that had been set aside in favor of the chaotic earthiness of the shantytown of The Bridge in Virtual Light . The novel is set in a near-future Tokyo, which has been partially reconstructed via nanotechnology following a massive earthquake. One of the most engaging elements of Gibson’s fiction has always been a sense of atmosphere, and his affection for Tokyo manifests through the constantly-shifting backdrop of bars, hotels, arcades and general streetlife of the deeply-urbanized megacity. Tokyo itself has a reputation for being something of an aesthetic science fiction wonderland. By capturing some of its natural strangeness, Gibson is able to use it as an exploration of his most commonly-recurring theme: the unexpected ways that ideas develop or are adapted into completely new phenomena. Throughout Idoru we have, for example, one bar which preserves the post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the city post-quake and another, Kafka-themed, complete with insectile bar stools and bruised inmate waitresses. Tokyo itself, its new buildings grown” out of the rubble of the old through nanotechnology, is itself a metaphor for the ways that modernity re-appropriates and recontextualizes original meanings. Modern life is not directed; it simply grows, often in complex and unintended directions. Society and technology do not meld seamlessly; they tangle into each other and emerge like some sort of Cronenbergian mutant. The plot of Idoru concerns rumors that Rez, an aging rock star, wishes to marry Rei Toei, a Japanese virtual idol – the titular Idoru, a megacelebrity singer that is entirely a software construct. Rei inhabits the virtual world, drawing experience from the well of all available human information. This, the novel implies, allows Rei to remain relevant, to analyze the currents and patterns of human culture and so maintain celebrity indefinitely. The marriage of Rez and Rei Toei is a bridging between the abstract density of data and the singular experience of wealth and celebrity leading towards some new creation: an organic personification of all available human experience. Popular culture … is the testbed of our futurity,” Rei’s human handlers explain. If there were going to be genuine AI, the argument ran, it was most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with pretending to be human … AI might be created accidentally, and … people might not initially recognize it for what it was.” The post-modern suggestion, here, is that in creating a believable celebrity, the software engineers have inadvertently created something which by necessity has become organic, conscious life. It’s impossible to talk about Gibson’s work without also addressing the moments of prescience within. Gibson himself points out that his moments of imaginative creation were meant to address what he himself observed in the increasingly fracturing modern world. Yet at the center of the novel lies the Walled City – a distributed virtual environment modeled after Kowloon Walled City which functions as a sort of off-the-grid hacker commune. It is the digital equivalent of The Bridge – a virtual deadzone re-appropriated by the computing underground. Gone completely, here, is the romance of Neuromancer ‘s hacker community; Walled City is a community not of criminals but one defined by its independence, its removal from corporate powers of influence. It’s a prophetic examination of emerging issues of internet neutrality, a sort of virtual micronation, and eventually the only place within which the Idoru, Rei, is free to realize total organic growth. Something amorphous, startlingly organic;” Virtual Light December 29, 2012 January 6, 2013 ~ mvdoom ~ 11,959 Comments Virtual Light is, in many ways, the first really singular work of William Gibson, having broken with the romantic futurist stylings of his earlier novels while introducing recognizably modern weirdnesses into his fiction. Instead of the vast cityscapes of Neuromancer , we have a slum built atop an unstable Bay Bridge. We have out-of-work rentacops and bicycle messengers instead of hackers and street mercenaries. Gibson has stated that his move away from the high-tech cyberpunk” motifs of his earlier novels was necessary in order to examine the pervasive weirdness already happening outside his window. Virtual Light , as such, is set in a then-slightly-in-the-future California, which has bifurcated into two very different states. The glimpses we have of America reveal a society fracturing into creative weirdnesses: a religious cult that studies television, immigrant homicide detectives hired to counter their own national mafias, high-end retail shops that sell antique Southern racist memorabilia to wealthy South Central minorities with a sense of irony. The dystopia of the novel is one of class and economics – the middle class has liquified and the street has since found its own use for an abandoned Bay Bridge as a shantytown for the city’s homeless. Virtual Light contains the familiar downtrodden bottom-class on the edge of dystopia but, instead of the high-tech nightlands of Neuromancer , the residents of The Bridge operate coffee shops and booksellers. They recycle water and trade goods and services. They get by, and there’s a sense – for once, amidst all of fiction’s dystopic predictions – that maybe this is not such a bad thing. The Bridge is a patchwork of improvisation. It’s organic and unplanned, teeming with the warmth of human adaptation. Every addition and modification of the structure resounds with its creators’ personalities. It contrasts the rigid, grid-like world of San Francisco’s commercial sector. The plot of the novel concerns plans for a city-wide transformation into the sort of towering, sterile corporate arcology typical to something from Neuromancer . Gibson’s first three novels, the Sprawl trilogy, depicted enormous urbanized environments as large beyond reason, defined by their anonymous massiveness, but it does not seem to comment as to whether or not this is necessarily bad for the human condition (though we can infer, on our own, the significance of the Sprawl’s obsession with wealth, its teeming criminal underground, the high human price of technology). Yet in Virtual Light , Gibson clearly has affection for the underclass resisting that kind of assimilation and urbanization. The Bridge is the only community in the novel truly connected with itself, a self-sustained ecosystem in which services are traded and in which a police force does not exist. The horror of the novel’s re-development plan is that the new city, which will just grow” via nanotechnology, is completely planned and compartmentalized, unfeeling and indifferent. It is data and corporate commerce and not a human city at all. William Gibson has stated that Virtual Light is an attempt at literary naturalism” and that the two protagonists are more like most people than most people are like those console cowboys and razor girls in Neuromancer ”. Appropriately, both Chevette and Rydell spend the novel worrying about their jobs. Chevette is a bicycle messenger who doesn’t live well, but the opportunity of the job itself is enough. Rydell has gone through stints as a police officer and with private security but, not being good at anything in particular, is now considering a position in retail. Tellingly, this is in contrast to Neuromancer ‘s cyber-criminals and high-tech mercenaries. In a novel concerned with the organic warmth of human habitation, the characters here are sympathetic non-cartoons, and we feel through them the alien-ness of these information-dense, wealth-saturated and abstract ideals of high corporate commerce, worried as they are with getting by. They cannot afford...