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"The idea I want to push next is that the United States should make Siberia a Protectorate. Pay the Russians off – a hundred, two hundred billion dollars – and simply run Siberia in an ecologically responsible way."
- Gregory Benford
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| Virtual Meeting | ||
| A meeting space that exists only in a computer; the descendant of today's web conferences. |
William Gibson, the godfather of cyberpunk, dishes out some good work in Idoru. The descriptions of cyberspace are not just artful; they advance the plot by providing oblique details about characters and, invariably, exude a subtle ennui that is characteristic of Gibson's work.
| They met in a jungle clearing. Kelsey had done the vegetation; big bright Rousseau leaves, cartoon orchids flecked with her idea of tropical colors (which reminded Chia of that mall chain that sold "organic" cosmetic products in shades utterly unknown to nature. Zona, the only one telepresent who'd ever seen anything like a real jungle, had done the audio, providing birdcalls, invisible but realistically dopplering bugs, and the odd vegetational rustle artfully suggesting not snakes but some shy furry thing, soft-pawed and curious. The light, such as there was, filtered down through high, green canopies, entirely too Disneyesque for Chia - though there was not real need for light in a place that consisted of nothing else. |
| Technovelgy from Idoru,
by William Gibson. Published by Putnam in 1996 Additional resources -
|
You read a long way into this paragraph before you get any hint of unreality, which further heightens the effect.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Idoru
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and Technology by William Gibson
Tech news articles related to Idoru
Tech news articles related to works by William Gibson
Virtual Meeting-related
news articles:
- Virtual Reality and Your Spider Sense
| Did Frank Herbert Predict Bistable Displays Like E-Ink? |
| I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display |
| Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large |
| iPhone Air Fulfils Jobs' Promise From 2007 - A Giant Screen! |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
