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All Tomorrow's Parties
by William GIBSON
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Viking (1999)
ISBN: 0670875570
EAN: 9780670875573
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 288 pages
Edition: First edition.
SKU: 1626
Condition: Like New
Comments: THE HARDBACK BOOK! THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. PUTNAM, 1999. 1ST PRINT. HARDCOVER BOOK, SILVER, BLACK DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE FINE, LOOKS NEW! RAPID SHIPPING WITH FREE TRACKING, GREAT PACKAGING. PRIORITY AIR MAIL. WV-PK
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Customer Reviews
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A plausible, disturbing, but ultimately hopeful near-future world populated with interesting, familiar characters
Rating  (4)
Date: 2010-07-22
Inside a cardboard box in a Tokyo subway station, Colin Laney sees the end of the world.
Or, perhaps, the beginning.
What do a down-on-his-luck rent-a-cop, a sentient Artificial Intelligence construct, a wealthy power broker, a global chain of convenience stores, and a faceless assassin have in common? Not even Colin Laney knows for sure, but somehow, they're all intimately connected to a turning point in human history-a massive paradigm shift that's going to begin in San Francisco, and after it happens, nothing will ever be the same.
In All Tomorrow's Parties, William Gibson picks up where he left off in Idoru, bringing us back into the tortured mind of Colin Laney, a man with a singular ability to gather threads of cause and effect in the infosphere and anticipate when important things are about to happen.
The story skips through multiple points-of-view and tenses past, present, and future. A lesser writer would get an editorial dope-slap for shifting POVs so much, but in Gibson's hands, it works, and there's a method to his madness. Time and reality are malleable and, ultimately, illusory in Gibson's world, and the narrative reflects this sense of fluid existence-always moving, always changing, a river that is never experienced the same way twice.
As with Idoru, it was the puzzle at the heart of the story, the "what the heck is going on here?" factor that drew me in and kept me reading, along with Gibson's intriguing and very credible descriptions of a near-future society poised on a razor's edge between disintegration and transformation. The characters are interesting and accessible, but they're swept along by forces beyond their comprehension toward a destiny that, in the end, seems unavoidable. It raises questions about the reality and scope of human free will in a world that, while governed by "the synthesis of all human desire," frustrates the effort of any individual to enforce his or her own desires on that world or shift its momentum. All Tomorrow's Parties brings John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider to mind, a story in which the key to survival was riding the waves of continual change, understanding how to move and when to jump in order to be carried along on that eternal surf without wiping out.
Gibson ends his story on a note of optimism about people's ability to do that, which is probably the best outcome available in a worldview where God is absent, and organized religion is a relic, useless at best, deceptive and exploitative at worst. Gibson's future is visionary, but utterly rational, existential, and deterministic. There are lots of clocks and watches in this story, and I don't think that was an arbitrary choice.
All Tomorrow's Parties moves quickly and evokes a plausible, disturbing, but ultimately hopeful near-future world populated with interesting, familiar characters. If you enjoyed Idoru and want to find out what happens next (well, sort of), you'll like All Tomorrow's Parties.
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A Cocktail With Subtle Flavors
Rating (4)
Date: 2009-11-01
Gibson tells a story here about some people caught up in a conspiracy bigger than themselves and, I know, some folks think books should be about storytelling. Well, in some cases, they're wrong. The story here plays second fiddle to the details of the near-future world Gibson creates. It's in the details of this world that the reader gets her kicks and tastes the images that Gibson conjures -- in a way, this is a painting, it's poetry. Where else will you encounter the imaginary "Russian Chain Gun": "Disposable. Can't reload it. Caseless: this long square thing's the cartridges and barrel in one. No moving parts to it: ignition's electrical...Thing's packed with four hundred two-foot lengths of super-fine steel chain, sharp as razor wire." Indeed, Gibson's world is full of sharp edges but also of humanity: "The girl who drowned so long ago has settled now, swept down in a swirl of toffee hair and less hurtful memories, to where his youth turns gently, in its accustomed tides, and he is more comfortable that way." If this guy isn't one of our best writers, I don't know who is. I give this 4 stars instead of 5, only because Gibson has done better in Count Zero.
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How the mighty have fallen...
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-09-27
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
First of all, don't get me wrong: the "Sprawl Trilogy" (Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive) is 5-star stuff and still holds up 25 years after it was written. That said, I can't believe this is the same author, because All Tomorrows Parties is a mess on multiple levels.
I read this one cold and with no context, not realizing it was the third part of its own trilogy. Apparently several of the characters in this are also in the other two, but the book gives enough hints of their back-story that I wasn't at (too much) of a loss. **Maybe** I would have liked this book more if I had been more familiar with them, but I honestly doubt it -- my major problems were the plot and prose.
Plot-wise, the first half of this book was, quite simply, uninteresting. Nothing really happens. There are actually three or four sub-plots interwoven, only one or two of which even approach being interesting. When things start coming together in the final third of the book, it's too little, too late... and grinds to a halt almost as abruptly as it starts. I didn't FULLY understand the ending -- which may be because I'm unfamiliar with the first two books -- but even then I suspect the "um, what just happened!?!?" ambiguity/confusion is intentional on the author's part. I don't mind things like that if they are well-executed, but this one just wasn't.
My biggest complaint about this book, though, is the writing style. Other reviewers have called it "almost poetic" or even "Hemmingway-esque" but I think both descriptions are either incorrect or at best generous stretches. This book is a collection of sentence fragments, and it's exceedingly awkward to read. I have a hunch this was a style experiment, but it's one that just doesn't work.
I actually gave up on this about half way through, but ended up going back to it out of desperation (not having anything else handy that I'd rather read.) By that point, I was consciously aware I was finishing it just to finish it, which is NEVER a good sign. Admittedly, it does pick up a bit in the last act, but not enough to redeem itself.
Recommended for die-hard Gibson fans only. Casual fans (such as myself) or initiates who're unfamiliar with his work will be frustrated and/or disappointed.
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"And what shall she do with Thursday's rags / When Monday comes around"
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-07-20
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Flash back to 1911, the last time there was a nodal point in history, when the world ended as people knew it. What happened in 1911? "I'm still not sure," the plugged-in beadsman Laney admits. "Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there." Four years later, of course, Curie isolated radium, and in 1911 she received her second Nobel Prize.
Just as the world transitioned--quietly--from the Industrial Age to the Nuclear Age, so too will arrive the next era, that of nanotechnology, whose nodal point the cyberprophet Gibson sets in the third decade of this new millennium, changing "human history is some entirely new way." Whether for good or evil provides the thriller-like plot for "All Tomorrow's Parties."
The final installment of Gibson's Bridge Trilogy features many of the characters of the first two ("Virtual Light" and "Idoru"). It probably helps to have read them first (I hadn't), but the work does stand on its own. Still, several of the major characters cannot occupy the reader's imagination as effectively as they probably would have if I had been more fully introduced to them--particularly Laney, the hacker who hunts for evidence of the nodal point, and Rei, the Japanese cyber-superstar who exists only as code and hologram.
Gibson excels at weaving several fast-paced plots that converge on the Bay Bridge, spanning between San Francisco and Oakland, closed to traffic after the "Big One," and piled deep with shops and dwellings like the London bridges of old. There are at least a dozen memorable characters, both heroes and villains, although none strikes me quite as prescient and visionary as Silencio, the child savant whose ability to absorb the data-stream makes Laney look like an old Commodore 64.
But--in the same way the import of Madame Curie's discovery leaves Laney befuddled--the chase scene, melodramatic contrivances, and fiery conflagration that conclude the novel (and that resemble, more than anything, a Michael Bay-directed extravaganza) will leave one wondering, "What just happened?" Neither scientists nor society a century ago fully understood the earth-shattering significance of radioactivity, and--perhaps fittingly--Gibson leaves to the reader's imagination this trilogy's sequel, the Nanotech Age.
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It's the Bay bridge, not the Golden Gate bridge.
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-05-08
0 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
All through the novel, with its references to Terminal Island, Bryant Street, Oakland, and a second level, I never pictured the Golden Gate, even though it is on the cover. Gibson is depicting the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco. Look on a map.Not that this means much to the story, which felt like just a ride to me--a milk run with scenery through the not-to-distant future.
Although I could not follow all of the story, the metaphors, it seemed to me to be a story about two orphans with special gifts--one trying to use it for the common good, the other for himself with others as collatoral damage. I don't believe the mysterious node means much. It's about how they dealt with this upcoming crisis that was the story, and who they were aligned with, along with a view of the local dystopian scenery.
Because of the love Laney had shown Rei Toi, & Rydell's love, she chose to be loyal to their cause. She even mystified the most mystical character, the assassin, whose willingness to work for Harwood mystified me. She was the only one to truly move him. He loved who she represented to him. I wonder who he was searching for. Did he think Harwood knew where his dream girl was?
An intriguing book, but not one I'll read twice as I have some of Gibson's others. I've always been lost in his work, but enjoy it nevertheless.
I think love has something to do with this story. Love conquers all. Or being humane. I know this sounds corny, but look at how Silencio responded to the first gift he ever got from someone, that being the watch from the assassin.
Love, or true caring, true humaneness, saved Rydell and Chevette from certain death, when Fontaine was humane enough to let them in. The assassin--humane in some way to protect them all.
Laney and Harwood were marginally effective in their separate aims in spite of help from their helpers. Did the bridge people save themselves? City govt finally kicked in, sort of, with water to the fire. The bridge people were a motley community of caring neighbors. Is that love? Companionship? Humaneness? Harwood failed in his attempts to take control as well.The orphans both lost their lives, I assume.
Good vs evil and both are vanquished? What's left? Love, community, nanotechnology. I thought the nano stuff would be used for ill will, and though it has that potential, we see in the end that it depends on the user, as with anything else. It can actually be used for good--like rejuvenating antique watches and making non-humans human.
Love Gibson's writing though this was not a favorite for me. I still value the first three of his books--mona lisa overdrive, countzero and the other one I forget right now.
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