William Gibson invented the term "cyberspace" and the concepts of virtual reality and the Internet. He won the Hugo award for best science-fiction novel with Neuromancer, his first book. He has been hailed as a near-future prophet, then ignored in favor of more recent visionaries like Bruce Sterling. Still, science fiction isn't really about the future; in its secret heart, the best sci-fi is complex allegory for how we feel and think right now. Nobody presently writing in the genre captures this as effectively as Gibson does. When Idoru introduces us to Chia McKenzie—a teen punk on a fanclub-sponsored mission to Japan to investigate her rock idol's rumored marriage to an entirely digital woman—we meet a character whose most striking quality is her teenage-girl humanity. When we meet Laney—a chronically out-of-work net-surfer whose most marketable talent is the quasi-mystic ability to "dowse" the Internet for important data—his despair and fading confidence make a impression. All Gibson's marvelous cyber-trappings are here, with buildings that grow themselves and people who spend their entire lives gloved, goggled and plugged into a computer. But the reason to read Idoru is the effortless way the technological elements become part of the human environment; it might be a future dystopia, but for its lead characters, it's just a place to live. It's not visionary writing, but Idoru succeeds with great storytelling.