In the gaudy world imagined by Budz, few people go unphilmed. It would be like going naked today. Affiliation groups—"casts"—of people wearing identical or related imagery serve as futuristic gangs or posses. There's no aspect of life that philm doesn't penetrate. That's why a new experimental philm—subject to the mysterious phenomenon known as "idolons"—is so disturbing. It promises to ensnare humanity in a devilish kind of trap. So far, this new philm is being hosted only by a few test subjects. Subjects who are unaware of their danger.

One such is Pelayo, a young man who earns his living by testing new philms for a company called IBT. Pelayo's contact at IBT is a man named Uri. But Pelayo doesn't know that Uri is running his own shady game, in conjunction with Giles Atherton, a rich resort magnate. Pelayo's cousin, Marta, is also involved on the fringes of the new philm. And in the case of Marta, a Nigerian immigrant named Nadice, and scores of other women, the philm seems to have triggered virgin pregnancies! San Francisco detective Kasuo Van Dijk has encountered the corpse of one of these gravid female subjects and is on the trail of something he doesn't quite understand. Perhaps when he finally encounters the idolon expert Zhenyu al-Fayoumi, he'll get some answers. If he's not too late.

And meanwhile, a sect known as the Transcendental Vibrationists are rounding up all the virginally pregnant woman for their own religious purposes, while violent ware-smugglers are also after Nadice and Pelayo's new skin is starting to act really strange.

A fresh and funky cyber-bio future

In his first two books, the duology of Clade (2003) and Crache (2004), Mark Budz revealed himself to be an energetic, hip and talented post-cyberpunk, with a refreshing predilection for speculating on what bioengineering would bring. This new book finds Budz still hip, energetic and talented, but he's shifted his focus a bit, from the exclusively biological to the digitally prosthetic. For that's what his philm is: a whole-body prosthetic for the healthy. Just think of the "scramble suit" from Dick's A Scanner Darkly (1977), nastier and more potent, stabilized and adopted by the whole populace.

The premise is simple, stated thus, but Budz complicates it deliciously and pushes its ramifications into every corner of his imagined world. The new social etiquettes that arise, the spinoff industries that support philm (Marta works in "Get Reel," a kind of philm beauty parlor, for instance), the potential it has to reorder love, death and other human verities—all these areas and more are explored.

Budz is not hesistant about examining the philosophical implications of this grand masquerade, either. From the two quotes that open the novel, right through to such passages as this one, on page 285, he's probing the nature of appearance and reality like a genre Baudrillard: "Each day reality became a little less familiar ... a little more uncertain. [Ellipsis sic.] Maybe that was why so many people cast themselves in the past. It wasn't real, but it had been real. [Italics sic.] Which was more than anyone could say for the future." Coincidentally, Budz's vision dovetails at several points with that of Vernor Vinge in his newest, Rainbows End. When two such voices begin to chime, perhaps we should start to heed these prophecies.

Budz works in the jumpcut narrative mode of classic John Brunner or Norman Spinrad, buzzing from one point of view to another. Neal Stephenson seems another kindred spirit here. I can't say that any of the characters assumes the depth of those in, say, Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), but they're all sturdy and believable. Perhaps Marta emerges as the most empathetic, and it's fitting that her perspective closes this exciting and densely thoughtful book.

Budz creates lots of spot-on neologisms for his new culture, one of which is "treal," as in "true and real," a compliment.

Idolon is way treal.