Idoru (Bridge, #2)

by William Gibson

“If we could ever once stop talking about the music, and the industry, and all the politics of that, I think I’d probably tell you that it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.”

Television, Drug of the Nation – Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

I’d tell her about the loneliness of being misunderstood. Or is it the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be understood?”

Nice

Chia herself had downloaded this black Silke-Marie Kolb blouson-and-tights set,

Who could have imagined that the reality of this would be as crass and crap as Fortnight skins today.

Except the one sitting by herself, at the head of the imaginary table, was a robot. Not like any real robot, but a slender, chrome-skinned thing like mercury constrained within the form of a girl. The face was smooth, only partially featured, eyeless,

A reference to the chrome cyborgs of Hajime Suriyama.

the single recorded image a view from a white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink fence, a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse of grayish-brown beach, and then the gray and silver sea. Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the image’s border, there appeared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated tower. Its stones were the color of the beach.

Dalkey in Dublin. Likely a view from an actual guesthouse when Gibson was promoting Virtual Light and visited with Bono (pox) and The Edge, who himself had one of the Martello Towers described. I love these artifCts in his books.

Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross, pointing left or pointing right, and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun, the kind they were always making out of those disposable flash-cameras, and the teacher had to call the police.

Right wingers were always dumber and more dangerous than most.

“Mishima and Dietrich

Yukio. Marlene.

“Somewhere in Ireland. Guesthouse with a beach view. Nobody there. Records of how it was kept stocked: stuff for the bathroom, toothpaste, shaving foam . . .” “I’ve been there,” she said. “That’s on an estate he bought from an older musician, an Irishman. It’s beautiful. Like Italy, in a way.”

And again, Dalkey and a U2 reference. They cited Neuromancer as a big influence on their Zoo TV era.

“And me in my good shoes,” she said.

An oddly Irish turn of phrase.

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya’s idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was the early Western World’s substance of choice).

Brilliant. Let’s go.

“That’s a Sherman tank,” Laney said, remembering a CD-ROM from Gainesville, one about the history of armored vehicles. Arleigh didn’t seem to have heard him. But then she’d probably never played with CD-ROMs, either. Time in a Federal Orphanage had a way of acquainting you with dead media platforms.

I dont know if they were dead at the time of writing or this was prescience or just the predictable death of all platforms eventually .

“Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile—”

I love this. A shared killfile.

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.

Weirdly even truer and more false than predicted.

and was suggesting the light turn itself off

Hey Siri…