JUST what is it that makes today's science fiction so different, so appealing? In William Gibson's case, it might be the way he mixes fact and fiction, old and new. The machines in his novels are super powerful yet mundane and messy, battered and held together by gaffer tape. Even his virtual reality devices require a bit of virtual dirt.
He also tunes into the alienation of being only just in the future. His latest novel, Idoru, is set vaguely some time after Tokyo's millennial earthquake, when the city has been rebuilt by nanotechnology (microscopic machines).
A local half Irish, half Chinese rock star has announced his forthcoming marriage to the idoru of the title. This is an idol singer, a hologram, a mesmerising piece of VR software, and Gibson pingpongs between the storylines of two people sent to Japan to investigate the bizarre love affair: a 13 year old fan and a "data miner" hired by the star's bewildered security manager.
Laney, the data miner, is a sort of cross between an online detective, a researcher and an investigative reporter. His job is to zoom inside databases to expose celebrities' seamy secrets for an ultra tabloid TV show (which, interestingly, we never see).
Laney swims through the data clouds left behind each time the target person makes a digital transaction by credit card, phone call or whatever. Then from these consumption patterns he builds up more complex pictures of their personalities and relationships. Unlike most data miners, though, Laney can also toggle between absolute abandonment and total concentration to follow the "nodal points" or fault lines within shoals of in formation.
Besides nodal thinking, the book's other main themes are the alienating nature of travel, the strangeness to Westerners of Japan's meaning systems, and the unreality of modern media fame.
In Idoru, fame has become overheated and overproduced. It has created stalkers and voyeurs, and stars who take up celebrity space just because they are celebrities. When stars are so massively but meaninglessly famous, who or what is real any more? Is it the bewitched rock musician, stuck in his bubble of fame, or the idoru, the evolving artificial life form which he adores?
Gibson's prose is more alluring than ever, squeezing ideas about the future into the minimum of space and fuss. For example, he won't just tell you that possessing cigarettes is now a criminal offence: he quickly adds that they haven't finished digitally erasing them from old movies yet.
If compressed metaphors are one of his trademarks - Gibson is, after all, the author who coined the term "cyberspace" - so are his obsessive descriptions of the surfaces of places and things. More often than not, too, these futuristic, fetishised objects already exist. You can be guaranteed, for example, that somebody somewhere is already data mining, or using drug checks based on DNA testing of small hair samples, or designing fridges which know you're in the room and which talk back, or "eyephones" for PCs.
By the end of the romp, though, the book has a please edit me for film feel about it. The narrative closure is too neat, and the symmetrical see sawing back and forth between Laney and the fan's stories becomes tiresome.
Still, if you ignore these weaknesses and go with the flow, you'll find Gibson at his most profound - mellow even - and far more optimistic than usual. Surprisingly, he also seems to be at his most autobiographical. Take the following:
"What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney knew he couldn't predict it, and something about the experience of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seem to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. Maybe something as small as . . ."
Yes, the famous author could be talking about his own techniques as a science fiction writer, about how he recognises the places where our own society's chaotic trends and mindsets are beginning to unravel themselves, in the strange nodes between the old and the new.
