Introduction
People have always used literature, especially science fiction (SF), as a way to express their concerns, allow readers to get distracted from real-life issues, and make their predictions regarding the future. In his SF novel, Gibson (1996) describes exciting events in the near future. Therefore, the reader recognizes many themes, trends, and social issues, which at the same time are changed and developed in accordance with the author’s ideas. In Idoru, virtual reality, media and technology, mafia government, unethical experiments conducted on children, and other topics are explored by Gibson (1996). All these moral, social, and legal matters are used to create or predict a possible future, and the novel carries the cultural functions of extrapolation, allegory, and satire.
The Cultural Work of Imagining the Future
Science fiction plays a significant role in maintaining and transforming society. It is related to the broader culture, highlighting those ideas, problems, and social relations to which readers should pay increased attention. According to Gernsback (2017, 18), “Science, through its various branches of mechanics, electricity, astronomy, etc., enters so intimately into all our lives today, and we are so much immersed in this science that we have become rather prone to take new inventions and discoveries for granted.” Thus, SF novels take this function of informing people about the expected value or harm of the developments they currently have, educating them in a sophisticated manner (Basu, Broad, and Hintz 2013). Such books are another tool used to make associations between various components affecting people.
In Idoru, the author manages to highlight the most acute social concerns. Firstly, Gibson (1996) pays tribute to the advances in technology that his contemporaries expected from the future, including smart fridges and elevators that can talk or toilets that can disinfect themselves. At the same time, SF is also about situating the present with the future, possibly us of pus laying string figures’ games (Haraway 2016).
Gibson (1996) takes the topic of media and TV shows, manipulates the string, and creates a world where television shows hunt other television shows that hunt celebrities, trying to expose their dirty secrets. The string is around the author’s finger, and the shows that reveal other unethical shows are seen as positive and contributing. However, the author can get the string in a different position, and all these shows become immoral, as they use the same PR pattern. Since this unethical nature of TV shows can be seen in reality, the writer also relates it to the future and makes the reader question whether this is the cultural and media world they want to live in.
Prediction Versus Allegory
Further, the concepts of prediction and allegory about Idoru can also be explored, as both are present in the novel. According to Le Guin (1976), “the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future.” This role of SF novels of future predictors is also supported by Gernsback (2017), who states that many writers in this genre are considered real prophets. This trend can be explained by the information provided earlier in the paper. Thus, many authors take current events, social problems, and tendencies and imagine them in the future, and their careful analysis leads to the accuracy of predictions.
Certain extrapolations are found in Idoru, including the dark web and digital idols. At some point in the novel, the characters enter the Walled City, which appears to be cyberspace similar to the modern dark web (Gibson 1996). When describing it, one of the characters says, “Walled City is off the net, but not on it. There are no laws here, only agreements” (Gibson 1996, 220). Further, the idoru itself as a character is what people in China now call digital pop stars, so Gibson (1996) might have analyzed society’s affection toward celebrities and technologies and anticipated this mixture of an idol and virtual reality. Nevertheless, some theorists wonder whether the author wanted to share his predictions in such a direct way.
This question leads to a slightly different view of Idoru, as some readers find it allegoric. According to Briggs (2013, 680), “Cyberpunk’s speculative dimension … counterpoises both the work of prediction, of narrowing down the possibilities by determining the most likely of scenarios and the form of allegory, of rendering artistically what is going on in the world.” SF writers can show presence and reality by highlighting some of its elements and ignoring others (Jameson 2017; Zähringer 2017).
One may thus suggest that Gibson (1996) created an allegory, referring to his contemporaries being overly passionate about the lives of pop stars and celebrities and paying little attention to actual issues. Gibson (1996, 10) writes, “Somewhere east of here, there had been rocket attacks and rumors of chemical agents, the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.” Further, children in orphanages are used by the government to test potentially dangerous drugs. Yet none of the characters pay enough attention to these critical concerns, as people live in a warzone almost unnoticing it, and readers should possibly reflect on this fact.
Speculation and Estrangement
Eventually, it is essential to discuss how the phenomena of speculation and estrangement can be found in SF literature. Earlier in the paper, it was mentioned that Gibson (1996) creates a setting in the future that is relatively familiar to readers, as they can recognize references to the modern reality in Idoru’s world. At the same time, Jameson (2017) and Suvin (2017) indicate that SF novels do not always aim to make connections between their settings and readers’ reality. Some aspects of Gibson’s (1996) novel restructure and defamiliarize readers’ experiences with their present so they can perceive it as the past of what is described in Idoru (Jameson 2017). Societies are yet unfamiliar with the concept of nano-buildings, but people can think about modern trends and reality being able to result in such technologies in the future.
Conclusion
As a science fiction novel, Idoru has several cultural functions that allow it to predict the future, warn the audience, create allegories, and change the reader’s perception of reality. Thus, Gibson draws people’s attention to contemporary issues of their overly strong focus on celebrities, technologies, and media. The author also predicts certain phenomena that develop in the real world while giving allegoric descriptions of communities ignoring severe issues while paying increased attention to the well-being of celebrities. Lastly, Idoru can be seen as a book that does not predict the future but changes the perception of the present, making it appear as history.
References
Basu, Balaka, Broad, Katherine R, and Carrie Hintz. 2013. “Introduction.” In Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, 1-15. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Briggs, Robert. 2013. “The Future of Prediction: Speculating on William Gibson’s Meta-Science-Fiction.” Textual Practice 27 (4): 671-693. Web.
Gernsback, Hugo. 2017. “Editorial: A New Sort of Magazine.” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, edited by Rob Latham, 18-19. London: Bloomsbury.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. “Introduction.” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 1-8. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 2017. “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, edited by Rob Latham, 204-216. London: Bloomsbury.
Le Guin, Ursula. 1976. “Introduction.” In The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books.
Suvin, Darko. 2017. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” In Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, edited by Rob Latham, 114-124. London: Bloomsbury.
Zähringer, Raphael. 2017. “Introduction.” In Hidden Topographies: Traces of Urban Reality in Dystopian Fiction, 1-6. Berlin: Walter de Gryter.