Although Colin Laney (from Gibson's earlier novel Idoru) lives in a cardboard box, he has the power to change the world. Thanks to an experimental drug that he received during his youth, Colin can see "nodal points" in the vast streams of data that make up the worldwide computer network. Nodal points are rare but significant events in history that forever change society, even though they might not be recognizable as such when they occur. Colin isn't quite sure what's going to happen when society reaches this latest nodal point, but he knows it's going to be big. And he knows it's going to occur on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, which has been home to a sort of SoHo-esque shantytown since an earthquake rendered it structurally unsound to carry traffic.

Colin sends Barry Rydell (last seen in Gibson's novel Virtual Light) to the bridge to find a mysterious killer who reveals himself only by his lack of presence on the Net. Barry is also entrusted with a strange package that seems to be the home of Rei Toi, the computer-generated "idol singer" who once tried to "marry" a human rock star (she's also from Idoru). Barry and Rei Toi are eventually joined by Barry's old girlfriend Chevette (from Virtual Light) and a young boy named Silencio who has an unnatural fascination with watches. Together this motley assortment of characters holds the key to stopping billionaire Cody Harwood from doing whatever it is that will make sure he still holds the reigns of power after the nodal point takes place.

Although All Tomorrow's Parties includes characters from two of Gibson's earlier novels, it's not a direct sequel to either. It's a stand-alone book that is possibly Gibson's best solo work since Neuromancer. In the past, Gibson has let his brilliant prose overwhelm what were often lackluster (or nonexistent) story lines, but this book has it all: a good story, electric writing, and a group of likable and believable characters who are out to save the world ... kind of. The ending is not quite as supercharged as the rest of the novel and so comes off a bit flat, but overall this is definitely a winner. --Craig E. Engler


From Publishers Weekly
Gibson is in fine form in his seventh novel, a fast-paced, pyrotechnic sequel to Idoru. In the early 21st century, the world has survived any number of millennial events, including major earthquakes in Tokyo and San Francisco, the expansion of the World Wide Web into virtual reality, a variety of killer new recreational drugs and the creation and later disappearance of the first true artificial intelligence, the rock superstar know as the Idoru. However, Colin Laney, with his uncanny ability to sift through media data and discern the importance of upcoming historical "nodes," has determined that even more world-shattering occurrences are in the offing. Letting his personal life fall apart, suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder related to his talent, Laney retreats to a cardboard box in a Tokyo subway station. There he uses his powers and an Internet connection to do everything he can to head off worldwide disaster. Contacting Berry Rydell, former rent-a-cop and would-be star of the TV show Cops in Trouble (and a character in two of Gibson's previous novels), Laney first maneuvers him into investigating a pair of murders committed by a man who is mysteriously invisible to the psychic's predictive powers, and then into recovering the Idoru, who is seeking independence from her owners. Also involved in the complex plot, centered on the bohemian community that has grown up on and around San Francisco's now derelict Golden Gate Bridge, are several other returning characters, such as the incredibly buff former bicycle messenger Chevette, plus a number of new eccentrics of the sort the author portrays so well. Gibson breaks little new thematic ground with this novel, but the cocreator of cyberpunk takes his readers on a wild and exciting ride filled with enough off-the-wall ideas and extended metaphors to fuel half a dozen SF tales. Author tour. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Roused from his self-imposed isolation in Tokyo, cyberjock Colin Laney enlists the aid of freelance security cop Berry Rydell to investigate a series of postmillennial upheavals centered in San Francisco. Building on the story begun in Idoru, Gibson achieves another milestone in his stunning portrayal of a dystopic 21st century filled with virtual paradises and real-life squalor. A master of the cyberpunk genre, Gibson excels at visually exciting storytelling. A good selection for sf collections. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Tom LeClair
Compared to Idoru and Virtual Light, the world of All Tomorrow's Parties is lo/rez, but the author appears to have been highly resolved to compose a trilogy, even if the result is Virtual Lite.


From Booklist
Colin Laney, the "netrunner" of Gibson's Idoru (1996), is hiding in a hovel in a cardboard city in the heart of Tokyo, with his eyes seemingly permanently attached to eyephones connecting him to the console on which he scans information from around the world. Attuned to subtle alterations in the data flow, he can sense an approaching paradigm shift, one of the "nodal points in history." "Last time we had one like this was 1911," he remarks. In Gibson novels, change happens not in small increments but massively, in a cataclysm, an apocalypse. The approaching change here is somehow linked to Rei Toei, the idoru (a virtual being), who is at large in San Francisco; Berry Rydell, a former security guard at the Lucky Dragon convenience store on Sunset, who first appeared in Gibson's Virtual Light (1993) and is now in Laney's employ; Chevette the bike messenger, also from Virtual Light; and Cody Harwood the "uncharismatic billionaire," whose plans to network his Lucky Dragon stores with the aid of a device that transmits objects across space are at the crux of everything. Gibson's protagonists are misfits. Their disparate stories get woven together in time for a showdown of sorts on the Bay Bridge, which has become a community of outsiders since the earthquake that made it unsuitable for automobiles but ideal for squatters. Gibson's new book is less a cyberpunk novel about virtual reality than one that realizes an almost recognizable future filled with new and exciting technologies. Although most of the action occurs in the "meat" world, Gibson's vision is inextricably linked to the advent of the Internet, whose possibilities he envisioned in the book that made him a big sf name, Neuromancer (1984). Benjamin Segedin


From Kirkus Reviews
More ultra-cool cyberpunk, sort of a sequel to Virtual Light (1993) and Idoru (1996). The disasters predicted for the end of the millennium never happened. Colin Laney, however, has a peculiar talent for seeing ordinarily imperceptible data associations, or nodal points, an ability brought about by childhood exposure to an experimental drug. Now down-and-out in Tokyo, subsisting on blue cough syrup and stimulants, he's perceived an upcoming event that will change the world, just as the previous one did in 1911. Aware of a shadowy killer who leaves no traces in the Net, Laney contacts his old pal, former rent-a-cop Berry Rydell, in San Francisco, sending him money and a mysterious package. Others are drawn into Laney's virtual world: the weird, watch-loving boy Silencio; erstwhile motorbike messenger Chevette Washington; the mysterious inhabitants of the virtual Walled City; and industrialist Cody Harwood, who's dosed himself with Laney's drug and in effect is creating the node. Harwood plans to build a network of nanotech replicators, presently forbidden by most governments. Rydell's package is a projector containing the virtual personality, or idoru, Rei Toei. Harwood's shadowy assassin, Konrad, refuses to kill Rydell, and the characters converge at the Bay Bridge for a conclusion that's as strange as it is baffling. This familiar, vigorous, vividly realized scenario is set forth in the author's unique and astonishingly textured proseindeed, in Gibson's books the texture is the plotbut the unfathomable ending will satisfy few. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
October 1999

Virtual Confrontation

From the beginning of his career, William Gibson's fiction has dealt with the emerging interface between human beings and the furiously evolving field of information technology. His famous first novel, Neuromancer, popularized the concept of cyberspace and provided an entire generation of science fiction writers with a working model of the digitized society that is just around the corner. With All Tomorrow's Parties, his sixth and latest solo novel, Gibson reaffirms his position as the prose poet of the information age, giving us a complex, densely imagined portrait of a near-future society poised on the edge of a profound and mysterious change.

All Tomorrow's Parties is the concluding volume in a loosely connected trilogy that began six years ago with Virtual Light and continued, three years later, with Idoru. In the world of these novels, the millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake an America that is battered and balkanized but still essentially itself. As the new novel opens, Colin Laney — digital prognosticator and protagonist of Idoru — has come to the conclusion that larger, more fundamental changes are on the way and will shortly put an end to the governing paradigms of the early 21st century.

Laney is one of Gibson's most unique creations, a man who was subjected to an illegal drug experiment as a child and who has since developed a singular talent: He can immerse himselfinanonymous streams of data and identify what he calls the "nodal points," the crucial turning points in the lives of individuals and in the histories of entire societies. All Tomorrow's Parties concerns Laney's ongoing attempts to understand the nature of the massive new nodal point he believes is imminent and to prevent, if possible, a dimly perceived series of post-millennial catastrophes.

Although he knows very few things for certain, Laney believes that California will be the starting point for the forthcoming change. He therefore contacts an old acquaintance named Berry Rydell — a hard-luck ex-policeman and the hero of Virtual Light — and sends him to San Francisco to act as his agent-in-place. Laney also believes that the prime mover behind this unspecified change will be billionaire industrialist Cody Harwood, whose "signature" appears over and over again in the oceans of data that surround the nodal point. Subsequent investigation reveals that, years before, Harwood had voluntarily subjected himself to the same experimental drug that gave Laney his peculiar ability; that Harwood is himself capable of discerning the nodal points in the world's data stream; and that he has spent years manipulating events in order to insure himself a dominant position in the reconfigured world, a world whose essence will be altered by the new technologies that Harwood himself will sponsor and control.

The resulting drama — which is, in effect, a no-holds-barred struggle for the soul of the future — is played out against an array of brilliantly realized settings, some actual (such as the Bridge, a squatter's haven built on the ruins of the structurally damaged San Francisco/Oakland Bridge) and some virtual (such as the vast, multifaceted Walled City, a gigantic software construct built and maintained by outlaw hackers who have effectively seceded from the human mainstream).

Characters caught up in the drama are likewise divided along physical and virtual lines. Included among them are Virtual Light's Chevette Washington, the former bicycle messenger who was once Berry Rydell's lover; Silencio, a damaged, perhaps autistic adolescent with an uncanny ability to find his way through the unmapped regions of cyberspace; Shinyu Yamazaki, existential sociologist and perennial student of 21st century culture; and, most centrally, Rei Toei, the Idoru of Gibson's previous novel, a beautiful, artificially intelligent entity who is described as "a sea of code, the ultimate expression of entertainment software." Rei Toei is a new order of being, a constantly evolving artifact of the digital age, and she will play a pivotal role in the climactic confrontation with Cody Harwood.

All Tomorrow's Parties is typical, top-level Gibson: elegant, alternately hard-edged, and dreamlike, filled with the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of a future that is at once deeply familiar and intensely strange. As in all of Gibson's work, the brilliance of the book lies in its extraordinary sense of detail. There are no throwaway moments in this novel, no poorly constructed sentences, no vague or imprecise descriptions. Gibson pays attention to everything, from the "interstitial" societies of the decaying urban wilderness to the gaudy technological marvels of the virtual world. The result is a believable, frightening, and thoroughly imagined portrait of the shifting realities of post-millennial America. All Tomorrow's Parties is William Gibson at his visionary best, and it comes highly recommended. Anyone with an interest in contemporary science fiction — or in literate, intelligent, exploratory fiction of any sort — needs to read this book.

—Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. At the Foot of the Story Tree, his book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, will be published by Subterranean Press in the spring of 2000.

ANNOTATION

All Tomorrow's Parties is the perfect novel to publish at the end of 1999. It brings back Colin Laney, one of the most popular characters from Idoru, the man whose special sensitivities about people and events let him predict certain aspects of the future.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"William Gibson's rich protopointillism coins a wireless future where reality is only proxy and proviso. Made all the more beautiful and frightening by its probability, and by characters who somehow tweeze hope from the polymer." --Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files

"One of science fiction's greatest literary stylists...Gibson wouldn't be Gibson if he spelled it out, if he eliminated all the ambiguity. His specialty is hanging on to that fractal edge without ever going over the brink." --Wired Magazine

"All Tomorrow's Parties hits on all cylinders." --Seattle Times

"More ultra-cool cyberpunk... This familiar, vigorous, vividly realized scenario is set forth in the author's unique and astonishingly textured prose." --Kirkus Reviews

"The post modern gospel according to Gibson, the patron saint of cyberpunk literature." --Entertainment Weekly

"It's as if Raymond Chandler had written a novel in which Philip Marlowe drops acid, learns Microsoft Word 98 and winds up eating Thai food at a funky San Francisco dive...the most delicious of reads: genre with real literary spunk." --New York Daily News

"All Tomorrow's Parties is immensely engaging, alive on every page and as enjoyable a weekend entertainment as one could want."--The Washington Post Book World

William Gibson is the New York Times bestselling author of Virtual Light, Count Zero, Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa, Overdrive, Idoru, and Neuromancer .

SYNOPSIS

William Gibson, who predicted the Internet with Neuromancer, takes us into the millennium with a brilliant new novel about the moments in history when futures are born.

FROM THE CRITICS

Wired

More ultra-cool cyberpunk, sort of a sequel to Virtual Light (1993) and Idoru (1996). The disasters predicted for the end of the millennium never happened. This familiar, vigorous, vividly realized scenario is set forth in the author's unique and astonishing textured prose -- indeed, in Gibson's book the texture is the plot -- but the unfathomable ending will satisfy. From the Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1999

All the heroes in All Tomorrow's Parties wield knives. Chevette, the onetime bike messenger and second-best thing in William Gibson's 1993 Virtual Light, has one hammered from a motorcycle drive chain. Rydell, former cop, night watchman, and now convenience store security guy, sports a lightweight ceramic knife, although he doesn't much like its balance. And the mysterious Konrad, the man who kills without fuss or muss, brandishes the deadliest blade, the one "that sleeps head down, like a vampire bat."

So many sharp knives slice elegantly through the virtual realities and nanotechnological macguffins that populates Gibson's latest novel. And appropriately so. When Gibson, one of science fiction's greatest literary stylists, is at his best, he offers visceral detail ("helicopters swarming like dragonflies") even when promising transcendent change ("the mother of all nodal points" -- a moment in the near future when the fabric of daily life will twist profoundly).

Gibson wouldn't be Gibson if he spelled it out, if he eliminated all the ambiguity. His specialty is hanging on to that fractal edge without ever going over the brink.

Frank Houston - Salon

William Gibson is so secure in his status as a prophet of the digital age that it's easy to forget he's been publishing novels for just 15 years -- about as long as the Apple Macintosh has been around. But the computer revolution is all the history Gibson needs for his books; he combines it with old-fashioned notions of character and suspense and skews his novels hyperkinetically forward in time. A futurist who plays games with the present, Gibson imbues his stories with elements of technology both recognizable and unfathomable.

In his first novel, Neuromancer, he explored the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace (he coined the word himself, in a 1981 short story), navigated by hackers and elegant forms of artificial intelligence who appear as ghosts in the machine. Idoru (1996) is set in 21st century Tokyo, where Rez, the lead singer in a rock band, becomes engaged to a pop singer named Rei Toei, a synthetic "idoru" simulated holographically by software agents. Rez's personal security detail hires Net runner Colin Laney, who can detect obscure patterns in electronic data and thereby predict aspects of the future, to ease their worries about the strange nuptials.

In his new novel, All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson taps the vein of our cultural angst where it runs nearest to the surface: millennialism. He returns here to Colin Laney and Rei Toei, as well as to characters from 1993's Virtual Light, which, like All Tomorrow's Parties, is set in NoCal and SoCal (the two states that formerly constituted California) in the not too distant future. In his now familiar collision-course style, Gibson hurtles his cast toward San Francisco and the "cusp of some unprecedented potential for change" -- the kind of widespread social disruption everyone had expected way back at the turn of the millennium.

Something in the air here points toward the lawless and decentralized distant future Gibson envisioned in Neuromancer, in which "the multinationals that shaped the course of human history had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality." This novel is about the end of the world as we know it. Laney is still in Tokyo, strung out on data and living in a cardboard box in a subway station. He can sense that something big is about to happen. But all he is sure of is that it involves the famously famous Cody Harwood -- a "twenty-first century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen" -- and that he has to stop him from attaining his nefarious (if obscure) goal.

Writing at flame intensity, Gibson conjures a world that seems just a breath away from the here and now. All Tomorrow's Parties fits into his unfolding story of the next century, a time of darkness and decaying cities. A sense of claustrophobia permeates the book, with characters living in boxes, coffin-like rooms and vans. The motif of transition -- of being between things, or "interstitial," as one character puts it -- runs through the tale, which builds to a climax literally between two cities, amid the ruins of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which has been closed to traffic after a massive earthquake (the "Little Big One") and transformed into a rundown bazaar.

Gibson has trouble making his endings as vivid and precise as all the details leading up to them, and All Tomorrow's Parties suffers in this respect. The ultimate conflict has to do with introducing nanotechnology -- a manufacturing process on the molecular level -- to the mass market. In the real world, nanotech is actually being researched and developed, by the Pentagon among others. Outrunning the future can be tough in the digital age. You have to hand it to Gibson for managing, once more, to stay at least one step ahead.

VOYA

Sick and hiding out in a cardboard carton in the Tokyo subway, Laney analyzes data streams, which he accesses through a cyber interface. He senses the approach of a pivotal node in history, shaped by a confluence of events that will take place in post-earthquake San Francisco. He needs a man on the ground, and he hires an ex-cop named Rydell. At the same time, a very rich man named Harwood similarly is attuned to approaching change. Harwood's goal is simple--to organize change for his personal benefit, regardless of the cost. On the Bay Bridge, closed now to all but pedestrian traffic and home to an assorted culture of drifters and entrepreneurs, many characters play their parts in a complex drama that culminates in a conflagration. Harwood's manipulations fail; many profit, but he is a major loser. Master of a pointillist style, Gibson offers a brilliant moving picture of an often-bleak future world in which virtual and actual blur and merge. His characterization is masterly, and his intricate plot demands--and rewards--concentration. Here is a story that seduces readers with the notion that today's science fiction might indeed be tomorrow's reality. It will delight sophisticated cyber fans and sci-fi readers. VOYA CODES: 4Q 2P S A/YA (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; For the YA with a special interest in the subject; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult and Young Adult). 1999, Putnam's, Ages 16 to Adult, 278p, $24.95. Reviewer: Rayna Patton

Library Journal

Roused from his self-imposed isolation in Tokyo, cyberjock Colin Laney enlists the aid of freelance security cop Berry Rydell to investigate a series of postmillennial upheavals centered in San Francisco. Building on the story begun in Idoru, Gibson achieves another milestone in his stunning portrayal of a dystopic 21st century filled with virtual paradises and real-life squalor. A master of the cyberpunk genre, Gibson excels at visually exciting storytelling. A good selection for sf collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/99.] Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Internet Book Watch - Internet Book Watch

Surrealistic images of darkness, an uncertain set of friendships, and inner city urban landscapes changed by violence and confrontation make for a futuristic story of change. Gibson's poetic voice shines in these contrasts between night and day, light and dark personalities in a changing world.Read all 13 "From The Critics" >

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