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dated but fascinating
Sep. 7th, 2007 12:35 pmSpeed Tribes, by Karl Taro Greenfeld
Profiles of disaffected Japanese youth, covering the gamut from porn stars to yakuza to college students to otaku, in the early 90s. It was really interesting, and there was a Gibson blurb on the back saying something like "wow, i'll be stealing ideas from this for years to come" - sure enough, in one throwaway paragraph, I spied the central idea of Idoru. My one quibble is that it's mostly written in the style of journalism I least trust: third person, but so far inside the heads of the people being profiled that you think the writer stands a good chance of making it up. Now, probably he was just doing a good job integrating his interviews into a coherent narrative, but it still makes me twitchy, and the more well-done it is, the twitchier it makes me.
(186/250)
Profiles of disaffected Japanese youth, covering the gamut from porn stars to yakuza to college students to otaku, in the early 90s. It was really interesting, and there was a Gibson blurb on the back saying something like "wow, i'll be stealing ideas from this for years to come" - sure enough, in one throwaway paragraph, I spied the central idea of Idoru. My one quibble is that it's mostly written in the style of journalism I least trust: third person, but so far inside the heads of the people being profiled that you think the writer stands a good chance of making it up. Now, probably he was just doing a good job integrating his interviews into a coherent narrative, but it still makes me twitchy, and the more well-done it is, the twitchier it makes me.
(186/250)
