completely controlled by lowest-common-denominator media manipulation. The name comes from—the meshbacked high-hat gimmie caps that meshbacks like to wear. A great new word like this jumps right off the page and into your daily language. I can’t wait for the next opportunity to say, “Oh wow, let’s get out of this place, it’s totally full of meshbacks.”
Speaking of great new words, Chia hooks up with a Japanese Lo/Rez fan club member who happens to mention that her brother is an otaku . Chia’s automatic translator renders “otaku” as “pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit.” Chia gets the picture instantly. “It’s a boy thing, right? The otaku guys at my last school were into, like, plastic anime babes, military simulations, and trivia. Bigtime into trivia.”
Idoru is set in the same future as Virtual Light , and some of the tone is the same as well. We’re so far into the future here that characters are totally lacking some of the basic knowledge we take for granted, e.g. the meaning of the swastika. There is “…a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history.” Bill knows meshbacks!
The boy character in Idoru is named Laney; he’s a little strange because he was given an experimental drug called 5-SB as a child, not that he likes to admit it, due to the long-term sociopathic effects it’s reported to have—5-SB “…makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians…” When quizzed about it, Laney suggests that maybe he’d only had a placebo. “You don’t mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son, but I think you know that.” A perfect Burroughs touch, crowned by the fact that the main somatic side-effect of 5-SB is this: “In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.”
Idoru continues to touch up Gibson’s vision of cyberspace, which is now becoming a fairly definite science fictional setting, something as standardized as the lunar colony domes and the generation starships of ‘50s and ‘60s SF. Today’s cyberspace is a huge, shared Virtual Reality which individual users can enter via small computers that they carry with them. Certain parts of cyberspace are difficult to enter, as they contain valuable information. You may encounter other users in cyberspace, and you may also encounter artificially alive software agents.
Although today’s World Wide Web is somewhat conspicuously lacking the effortless speed and Virtual Reality immersion of science fictional cyberspace, the Web’s difference from SF cyberspace is now only one of degree. Looking back, it’s hard to remember how radically new an idea this was when Gibson first wrote about it, lo these fifteen or so years gone. To a significant degree, the reputability of cyberpunk rests on this one visionary extrapolation. Jules Verne may have predicted the submarine, but William Gibson envisioned the explosive growth of the Web.
So it’s a special delight to see our Founding Father adding new touches to his vision. Here’s a funny description of something Chia see while in cyberspace with an otaku boy.
Something chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and saw a small white rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge. She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate, up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming to a halt when it was in optimum position to be read…It said “Ku Klux Klan Kollectibles,” and then some letters and numbers that didn’t look like any kind of address she knew.
Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray blur scoot from under it. Flat, whirling, fast. It was on the white rectangle now, something like the shadow of a crab or a spider, two-dimensional and
Speaking of great new words, Chia hooks up with a Japanese Lo/Rez fan club member who happens to mention that her brother is an otaku . Chia’s automatic translator renders “otaku” as “pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit.” Chia gets the picture instantly. “It’s a boy thing, right? The otaku guys at my last school were into, like, plastic anime babes, military simulations, and trivia. Bigtime into trivia.”
Idoru is set in the same future as Virtual Light , and some of the tone is the same as well. We’re so far into the future here that characters are totally lacking some of the basic knowledge we take for granted, e.g. the meaning of the swastika. There is “…a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history.” Bill knows meshbacks!
The boy character in Idoru is named Laney; he’s a little strange because he was given an experimental drug called 5-SB as a child, not that he likes to admit it, due to the long-term sociopathic effects it’s reported to have—5-SB “…makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians…” When quizzed about it, Laney suggests that maybe he’d only had a placebo. “You don’t mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son, but I think you know that.” A perfect Burroughs touch, crowned by the fact that the main somatic side-effect of 5-SB is this: “In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.”
Idoru continues to touch up Gibson’s vision of cyberspace, which is now becoming a fairly definite science fictional setting, something as standardized as the lunar colony domes and the generation starships of ‘50s and ‘60s SF. Today’s cyberspace is a huge, shared Virtual Reality which individual users can enter via small computers that they carry with them. Certain parts of cyberspace are difficult to enter, as they contain valuable information. You may encounter other users in cyberspace, and you may also encounter artificially alive software agents.
Although today’s World Wide Web is somewhat conspicuously lacking the effortless speed and Virtual Reality immersion of science fictional cyberspace, the Web’s difference from SF cyberspace is now only one of degree. Looking back, it’s hard to remember how radically new an idea this was when Gibson first wrote about it, lo these fifteen or so years gone. To a significant degree, the reputability of cyberpunk rests on this one visionary extrapolation. Jules Verne may have predicted the submarine, but William Gibson envisioned the explosive growth of the Web.
So it’s a special delight to see our Founding Father adding new touches to his vision. Here’s a funny description of something Chia see while in cyberspace with an otaku boy.
Something chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and saw a small white rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge. She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate, up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming to a halt when it was in optimum position to be read…It said “Ku Klux Klan Kollectibles,” and then some letters and numbers that didn’t look like any kind of address she knew.
Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray blur scoot from under it. Flat, whirling, fast. It was on the white rectangle now, something like the shadow of a crab or a spider, two-dimensional and
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