{"id":36,"date":"2005-12-30T10:01:12","date_gmt":"2005-12-30T09:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/?p=36"},"modified":"2010-03-29T08:03:02","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T07:03:02","slug":"idoru-william-gibson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/12\/idoru-william-gibson\/","title":{"rendered":"Idoru (William Gibson)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Sci-fi, 6\/10 &#8211; December 2005<\/em><\/p>\n<table cellpadding=\"2\">\n<tr>\n<td>\n<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tomfotherby.com\/Images\/BookReviewImages\/idoru.jpg?w=620&#038;ssl=1\" \/>\n<\/td>\n<td>\nIt&#8217;s supposed to be the 2nd book in the bridge series but it&#8217;s pretty self contained. It&#8217;s about a rock-star celebrity wanting to marry a sort of computer-generated personality called an Idoru. It is not confirmed whether the Idoru is truly AI but she lives in the net more than the real world.\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p>The books main character is called Laney and he has a rare ability to be able to visualise data which I find fascinating because I have often wondered about it myself. Laney can look at telephone bills, credit card bills, travel logs, shopping receipts, Internet activity, etc and form a picture of what has been going on and how a particular person lives. Gibson calls this quantitative analysis and Laney is a &#8220;quant&#8221; that can find nodal points in seemly random personal data. Gibson even ponders whether a skilled quant can almost predict the future because data seems to give clues about where things are going. I have been into software visualisation for a couple of years and have written programs that look for patterns in software structures, highlight keywords and generate flow-charts for the purpose of linking software programs. So I really understood the fictional storyline of the book and the birth of the Idoru. Great stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sci-fi, 6\/10 &#8211; December 2005 It&#8217;s supposed to be the 2nd book in the bridge series but it&#8217;s pretty self contained. It&#8217;s about a rock-star celebrity wanting to marry a sort of computer-generated personality called an Idoru. It is not confirmed whether the Idoru is truly AI but she lives in the net more than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-cyberpunk"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1582,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/1582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomfotherby.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}