Describes a certain kind of celebrity in Japan. The requirements are: must be female, young and cute. big boobs are a bonus, as is skill at dancing and singing, but none of these are strictly required. Their job consists of recording songs, posing in skimpy bikinis for weekly manga magazines and doing commercials. They are often given a stage personality geared towards maximum popularity, in other words: Idol careers are utterly fake, created by an industry that uses them to sell CDs, videos, trading cards and pretty much anything you can print an photograph on, until they lose popularity and are discarded for the next pretty face.

If this sounds a lot like Britney Spheres, the Spice Girls or various boygroups to you, you're right, but there are also some differences: While in the 1960s and 1970s, there tended to be one dominant idol at a time, the target group's taste changed in the 1980s towards more diversity and approachability, and nowadays there are a couple of dozen idol starlets active at one time, each of them with her own group of devoted followers, covering a small segment of the market. In between, there was a transition phase of idol groups, attempts to again gather huge market shares by combining the popularity of several idols. Virtual idols were another attempt to do something new (Kyoko Date wasn't the only one), but didn't catch on, probably because it's just a bit too much fakeness.

She got in line behind a man in a red leather jacket that said “Concept Collision” across the back in gray chenille letters. Chia stared at that, imagining concepts colliding, which she guessed was a concept in itself, but then she thought it was probably just the name of a company that fixed cars, or one of those slogans the Japanese made up in English, the ones that almost seemed to mean something but didn’t. This trans-Pacific jet lag thing was serious.

Idoru is the second science fiction book in the San Francisco Trilogy written by William Gibson in 1996. The style of Idoru is almost the same as in Virtual Light, with two main point-of-view characters and minor characters interceding. Berry Rydell and Yamazaki from Virtual Light both make appearances in this novel. As said before, Idoru is the wrong spelling of the phenomena known as aidoru. Aidoru are virtual media stars, an idea that began in Japan. Date Kyoko is a perfect example of what an aidoru is. It was published by Penguin Putnam in 1997.

Colin Laney had a strange childhood as an orphan. He volunteered for odd jobs, including drug testings, to get money. One of the strange drugs that was tested on him was the controversial SB-5. In the final testing stages it was found out that the drug caused the user to obsess about a celebrity figure. The obsession usually began with stalking and ended with murder. In addition, Laney has always had an attention deficit disorder. For some reason he has a strange ability of going through data and finding pertinent data, which he calls nodal points, and adding them togethor to find out what might happen next. His skills landed him jobs at Slitscan, a tabloid celebrity show, and Out of Control, a counter-investigative show. Slitscan dropped him when he got obsessed about the girlfriend of the man he was investigating. He realized that she was going to murder herself. He got into her apartment just after she had attempted to slit her wrists. He bandaged her wrists, but she simply got up and shot herself. After Out of Control dropped him, he began looking for a job again. Rydell, who was working as a security guard at Laney's hotel, gave him a connection in Seattle to Yamazaki. Laney was to investigate Rez of the band Lo/Rez, because he suddenly made the strange decision that he was going to marry the purely virtual computer creation, Rei Toei.

Chia McKenzie is a young teen member of the San Francisco chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club. Composed of mainly three members, it is decided that Chia should go to Tokyo to investigate the rumours of Rez's engagement to the aidoru, Rei Toei. She stumbles upon a lot more than she was expecting, and conspiracies that she had never considered.

Both Laney and Chia investigate through seperate means on the strange behaviousr of Rez and why Rei Toei wants to marry him.

The Walled City in the virtual space is inspired from pictures of the Kowloon Walled City that was introduced to Gibson by Sogho Ishii, a Japanese director. The character Keith Allan Blackwell was based upon the memoirs of standover man Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read. His memoirs are in the book Chopper from the Inside.


The San Francisco Trilogy:
Source:
http://www.8op.com/gibson/en/friscosumm.html

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