All Tomorrow's Parties
by William Gibson
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Book Summary Information
Author: William GibsonEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-02-04
ISBN: 0425190447
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Book Reviews of All Tomorrow's Parties
Book Review: Oddly Interesting Story
Summary: 5 Stars
A very odd story. There are shifts of location that sort of take you by surprise and then there are the trips through a computer land. Eventually you understand that this is a future world. It is an odd jumble of events that create the interest.
At first there is the odd character, Laney, who talks crazy and lives in a cardboard box near a commuter train station, yet is believed by Yamazaki, for some unknown reason, and you find yourself wanting to believe him also. Then there is Rydell, a loser in Los Angeles, who is marked by Laney as some one special. Lord only knows how Laney gets to know what he is talking about. He is a computer genius who was given drugs to enhance his ability and now he says he sees the future.
There are other characters introduced in subsequent chapters. You begin to wonder how they all will mesh in the end. Laney travels through a cyberspace as if it was a place anyone could go to. Rydell travels there some as well. I begin to wonder about what cyber trips would be like. Computers are just machines with code to work with. The output is more code. There is no 'place' a person could go to. I could see sitting there being all involved with the input and output, but seeing or acting like you are somewhere else, is beyond my comprehension. But for the sake of the story, I am willing to let the characters act and do as they will.
It is interesting that there is a self aware computer personality that becomes a bit of a star player in the story. Nothing is made of this situation, as if it was not really there, or was not understood for what it was.
There is also a fellow who follows the Tao. He is a killer extraordinaire. It is fascinating that the next book I read was "The Wandering Taoist." The culture of the Chinese Taoist's is martial arts as well as healing and finding their place in the Universe. But killing is not all that far from what all Taoists do.
The ending is awfully surprising and basically happy.
Summary of All Tomorrow's Parties
Rydell is on his way back to near-future San Francisco. A stint as a security man in an all-night Los Angeles convenience store has convinced him his career is going nowhere, but his friend Laney, phoning from Tokyo, says there's more interesting work for him in Northern California. And there is, although it will eventually involve his former girlfriend, a Taoist assassin, the secrets Laney has been hacking out of the depths of DatAmerica, the CEO of the PR firm that secretly runs the world and the apocalyptic technological transformation of, well, everything. William Gibson's new novel, set in the soon-to-be-fact world of "Virtual Light" and "Idoru", completes a stunning, brilliantly imagined trilogy about the post-Net world.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
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