SOURCE: Clute, John. “Science Fiction and Fantasy.” Book World—The Washington Post 26, no. 43 (27 October 1996): 11.

In the following review, Clute asserts that Idoru is beautifully written with striking detail and dense with insightful, imaginative metaphors.

For hundreds of pages, it seems he can do no wrong with the plight we're in. For most of its length. Idoru is the best novel William Gibson has ever written about the world we're entering daily, dense and remorseless and lit from inside: and even its final pages—Gibson's main weakness has always been soupy endings—are certainly no worse than the terminal shenanigans that, like some berserk pinball machine, shook Neuromancer to bits. That novel made Gibson just famous; Idoru cements that fame.

The secret of the new book, as with so many other novels about the world that seem to tell the truth about things, may be love. It was the...