SOURCE: Murray, Charles Shaar. “Dream Lover.” New Statesman 125, no. 4305 (11 October 1996): 44-5.

In the following review, Murray contends that Gibson's Idoru poses the questions: “What is reality? And who is human?”

Once you've changed the world with a mere paperback-original first novel, what do you do for an encore? When anyone lists the key texts of the contemporary science-fiction landscape, William Gibson's 1984 debut Neuromancer is the only work of prose fiction deemed as influential as movies such as Blade Runner and The Terminator. Inspired by the nerd-babble and dweeb-jargon of computer magazines and cranked out on a battered typewriter, Neuromancer brought punk romanticism and tech-noir cool to hard SF; coined the term “cyberspace” and invented not only the sub-genre called “cyberpunk” but a metaphor that seems to be remaking the world in its own image.

These days Gibson leaves cyberspace to the journalists, and to his regiment of imitators...