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Comment by BjornW | Hacker News Reader

Wow! This reminds me of the book Idoru by Willam Gibson.

Idoru on Wikipedia: "In the post Tokyo/San Francisco earthquake world of the early 21st century, Colin Laney is referred to agents of the aging mega-rock star Rez (of the musical group Lo/Rez, and seemingly very much styled after former The Smiths frontman, Morrissey) for a job using his peculiar talent of sifting through vast amounts of mundane data to find "nodal points" of particular relevance. Rez has claimed to want to marry a synthetic personality named Rei Toei, the Idoru (Japanese Idol) of the title, which is apparently impossible and therefore questioned by his loyal staff, particularly by his head of security, Blackwell.[...]" source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru

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This is one case where Gibson was slightly behind. Japan has been looking forward to holographic rock stars since Macross Plus in 1994 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKcud4Qs4_U#t=4m50s) --just ahead of Idoru (1996).

This reminds me of a short cyberpunk story. I can't remember the name/author, but it was about a world where the next level of entertainment was essentially generated from a brainmap of the "artist." There was a girl who was disabled/disfigured/diseased, and she ended up becoming the biggest and most popular artist ever due to the raw emotions she was conveying.

At the end she transfers her consciousness "to the cloud" and becomes completely digitized.

Anyone else read this?

Also Gibson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Market

Bingo, thanks.

This sounds like a really interesting story. Thanks for the tip.

I'm starting to think Gibson is writing the future.

These days, he focuses on writing the present

But only because by his point of view, the present is effectively the future he looked forward to. I've always felt it's both an interesting and bold position for a writer of sci-fi to take.

Does this mean that sometime soon, Gibson will be writing historical fiction?

In one sense, he already has.

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Visionary_influe...

Also a significant discussion of this phenomenon in PK Dick's VALIS trilogy

VALIS was a trilogy? What were the other two books (aside from the obvious VALIS)?

Divine Invasion, VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (perhaps not in that order).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS_trilogy

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