ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.When he was a child in an orphanage in Florida, Colin Laney participated in a research study in which he was given a drug that allows him to visualize and extract meaningful information from endless streams of internet data. Laney now has the ability to see nodal points in history — times and places where important changes are occurring. Even though he doesn’t recognize what the change will be, he “sees the shapes from which history emerges.”Laney is now an adult who’s sick and living in a cardboard box in a Tokyo subway station. He’s convinced that something big is about to happen in San Francisco. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he knows it will change the world. Unable to get there himself, Laney hires Rydell, a California rent-a-cop, to investigate.Rydell is pleased to be leaving his lowly night job at the Lucky Dragon convenience store, but his new assignment is not as easy as it first seems to be. First of all, he’s being followed by a bunch of thugs. Then there’s the mysterious silent killer who’s lurking around San Francisco. Not to mention Rydell’s ex-girlfriend Chevette and her video-camera-toting friend, a drunk and stimulant-addicted country singer named Buell Creedmore, a computer-generated Asian girl, and a black man named Fontaine who has two wives and sells watches and faux Japanese babies. Rydell has no idea what’s going on... And neither does the unfortunate reader who might be expecting an easy-to-follow plot with a beginning, middle, and end.But Gibson’s fans know that you don’t read his books for a fast-paced straight-forward plot. Gibson’s brilliance is in creating ideas, settings, technologies, and especially, vivid characters you can’t easily forget. Even minor characters are memorable when he gives them extensive backstories and names like Silencio, Boomzilla, Playboy, and my favorite, Praisegod Satansbane.Gibson’s “post-post-industrial” settings are fascinating. All Tomorrow’s Parties, and its two related BRIDGE trilogy books, Virtual Light and Idoru, take place in a future ruined California which has been divided into Northern (NoCal) and Southern (SoCal) states. Much of All Tomorrow’s Parties is set on and around the decaying San Francisco Bay bridge which is now stacked with ramshackle plywood dwellings and vendor stalls. That’s an unforgettable image.Cool tech is also to be expected in Gibson’s novels, and you’ll definitely find some in All Tomorrow’s Parties. My favorites here were the graffiti-eating paint, the quake-proof polymer building materials that engulf whatever’s thrown at them, the global interactive video screens on the pylons outside the Lucky Dragon stores all over the world, and the world-changing piece of technology that appears at the end of the novel.Those who’ve read the first two BRIDGE trilogy books (which are not required since All Tomorrow’s Parties can stand alone) may want to know what happened to the characters they met there, and there are some answers here, but as with Mona Lisa Overdrive, the sequel to Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero, these characters’ stories don’t so much resolve as just kind of leave us guessing at what might have happened next. Is it the end of the world as we know it, as Laney fears?But Gibson doesn’t leave us completely empty-handed. He gives us interesting things to think about, and perhaps a warning. He makes us wonder how emergent technologies will change us. Will we destroy ourselves with our cleverness? Could we fall in love with people who only exist in virtual reality? Can we become aware enough of the “shape of history” to predict what will happen in the future? Can we change the future? Can we thwart God? Can we become gods?I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version of All Tomorrow’s Parties, read by Jonathan Davis. His strong sonorous voice makes him one of my favorite readers. I just like listening to him anyway, but he’s especially brilliant when he’s performing William Gibson’s characters.
Ah, cyberpunk! Norman Spinrad declared the genre to be dead in one of his Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction rants of the early 90s. To be sure, other authors have tried to go different directions as with the retro-subgenres known as “steampunk” and “dieselpunk.” Neither has reached any critical mass of acceptance, though both are still interesting to me as an individual reader. Indeed, even though the “noble Norman” hath said that cyberpunk is dead, one can still savor the Neal Stephenson sagas since Snow Crash, Spinrad’s own Deus X story of a pope’s soul stored in a mainframe, Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire, and the conclusions of George Alec Effinger’s and Rudy Rucker’s trilogies. And, while the film based on Gibson’s work may have been an abysmal failure, the concept of cyberpunk lives on in The Matrix Trilogy and the rumored live-action Ghost in the Shell.So, is it any wonder that, as an admirer of Gibson, I finally got around to reading the “sequel” to The Idoru? Complete with its dark imagery of interstitial communities on the Oakland Bay Bridge (revisiting a setting in Virtual Light), its Tokyo subway station ghetto of homeless living in cardboard boxes, its scathing satire of convenience store consumption with the Lucky Dragon chain, and its self-parody with the Japanese craftsman creating a miniature of one of Gibson’s cyber-cowboys, this little romp has some of the pure invention and joy of his original foray into cyberpunk, Neuromancer. In this episode, the key to the novel is keeping the Idoru out of the wrong hands. Doing so requires recruiting an ex-cop with ambition of becoming a reality television star and the unsettling episodes of a woman who wants to photograph a documentary on the interstitial community via her mini-blimp-mounted camera platform. Perhaps, though, the most memorable new character in this novel is the young boy who is slow of speech but well in touch with the datastream. As he uses an old pair of goggles and a laptop to sift through tons of data about antique watches, matters get very interesting. Frankly, this novel approaches the thrill of the original novel. Though there is nothing of the thrill of the chase through cyberspace in this one that we enjoyed in Neuromancer, there is plenty of action and the sense that one is lurking in a shadow world of anarchy and anomie that is far better to read about than to experience.
What do You think about All Tomorrow's Parties (2003)?
I'm not sure how to describe this book. It was really, extraordinarily, bizarre, even for the notoriously weird Gibson. It seemed to be mostly about drifters in the midst of a really strange, tumultuous time, and as much as I liked it, it was... difficult to read, though I'm not sure of the reasons.Maybe it just affected my subconscious so much that /I'm/ feeling indecisive. Though indecisive isn't the word I'd use for these people. Just barely having a purpose and drifting.But beyond all that, I think this is probably the closest Gibson has written to an actual comedy. It's wacky in a lot of ways, just almost pulp over-the-top at times, and I got the impression that he just bombarded his characters full of as many bizarre and deranged things as he could and see where they ended up.I guess, in short, Gibson brings the bonkers. He's good at it. :)
—Ryan Viergutz
A sci-fi story about future homeless living on a now defunct Golden Gate Bridge and their survival skills. One of the bridge's inhabitants comes back home with a friend to shoot a documentary at the same time that a time conglomerate world-wide event that will shift life as we know it, is about to take place. This is being predicted by a mental man hiding in a cardboard box in the subways of Japan because as an orphaned boy he was chemically experimented on and the side effects give him powers to surf the ether-net in our world. Coincidentally the hired gun to go and fix the shift is none other than the ex-boyfriend of the girl who comes home to the bridge and she as well will be part of the equation. There are other main characters each as strange and interesting as the previous. Overall, I liked the book, though a lot of things are left purposely vaguely unexplained and it is left to the reader to connect the dots sometimes with too little information or too little descriptive language to get an accurate idea.
—Saskia Marijke Niehorster-Cook
"The past is past, the future unformed.""Something at once noun and verb.While Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of information knows himself to be merely adjectival....""Is a world within the world, and, if there be such places between the things of the world, places built in the gaps, then surely there are things there, and places between them, and things in those places too.""All his life Laney has heard talk of the death of history, but confronted with the literal shape of all human knowledge, all human memory, he begins to see the way in which there never really has been any such thing.No history. Only the shape, and it comprised of lesser shapes, in squirming fractal descent, on down into the infinitely finest of resolutions. But there is will. 'Future' is inherently plural.""He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography was dead. That history in the older sense was an historical concept. History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about where we'd come from and what it had been like, and those narratives were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation."
—Kelly O'Dowd
