7.8 /10 1 Votes
Country United Kingdom Series Bridge trilogy Publication date October 7, 1999 Page count 320 | 3.9/5 Goodreads Language English Publisher Viking Press Originally published 7 October 1999 Preceded by Idoru Genre Cyberpunk derivatives | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (hardback and paperback) Characters Colin Laney, Konrad, Berry Rydell, Chevette Washington, Cody Harwood, Tessa Similar William Gibson books, Cyberpunk books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
All Tomorrow's Parties is the third and final novel in William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. Like its predecessors, All Tomorrow's Parties is a speculative fiction novel set in a postmodern, dystopian, postcyberpunk future. The novel borrows its title from a song by Velvet Underground. It is written in the third person and deals with Gibsonian themes of emergent technology. The novel was initially published by Viking Press on October 7, 1999.
Contents
Plot summary
The book has three separate but overlapping stories, with the repeated appearance of shared characters. The San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge, the overarching setting of the trilogy, functions as a shared location of their convergence and resolution.
The first story features former rent-a-cop Berry Rydell, the protagonist of Virtual Light. Rydell quits a temporary job as a security guard at the Lucky Dragon convenience store to run errands for atrophied computer hacker Colin Laney (the protagonist of Idoru), who lives in a cardboard box in a subway in Shinjuku, Tokyo. As a child, Laney was the subject of pharmaceutical trials which damaged his nervous system. As a result, he suffers from a form of attention deficit disorder but gains the ability to discern nodal points in the undifferentiated flow of information, and from that he acquires a certain predictive faculty. This makes him ideal for the role of "netrunner" or data analyst. A side effect of 5-SB, the drug administered to Laney, causes the user to become attached to strong personalities. As a result, Laney has become obsessed with media baron Cody Harwood of Harwood/Levine, a powerful public relations firm. He spends his life surfing the net from his enclave in the subway, searching for traces of Harwood in the media. From this, Laney foresees a crucial historical shift which may precede the end of the world "as we know it". He predicts that Harwood, who had also taken 5-SB before (albeit voluntarily, with the knowledge of the consequences), knows this and will try to shape this historical shift to his liking. To stop Harwood, Laney hires Rydell under the guise of a courier to travel to San Francisco where he believes the next nodal point will congeal.
The second story concerns ex-bicycle messenger Chevette Washington, also from Virtual Light, who is on the run from her ex-boyfriend. She escapes to her former home, San Francisco's bridge community, to find refuge and revisit her past. She is accompanied by Tessa, an Australian media sciences student who visits the bridge to film a documentary on "interstitial communities".
The third story follows a mysterious, left-handed mercenary named Konrad. Although Konrad is employed by Harwood, he appears to be directed by his own motives. In particular, Konrad aligns his movements with the Tao, the spontaneous, universal energy path of Taoist philosophy.
Characters
Major themes
Major recurring Gibsonian themes which feature heavily in All Tomorrow's Parties are the sociological impact of emergent technology (notably nanotechnology and artificial intelligence), millennial alienation, the commodification of the counterculture, the existence of nodal points in history (most notably the dawn of the nuclear age in 1911), and the notion of the interstitial. Despite the novel's oblique reference to Madame Curie, Gibson has stated that his placement of the last major nodal point in 1911 was a "viewpoint joke," unconnected to factual events in that year. He had heard a story that Virginia Woolf "pinned the beginning of the modern era on a particular weekend in 1911." (Woolf had actually declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910," which inspired the belief that the modernist literary movement began around that time.)
The author's long-time fascination with Japanese culture continues in this novel.
Literary significance and reception
The novel was critically well-received, with particular note given to Gibson's vivid, well-realised setting and dense prose, though reviewers found its ending to be anti-climactic. Sci Fi Weekly reviewer Curt Wohleber praised the "precision and economy" of All Tomorrow's Parties in comparison to its sometimes dull predecessors.
Gibson scholar Tatiana Rapatzikou located the novel's significance in the fact that it had several motifs, themes and characters in common with Virtual Light and Idoru "without being sequential".
In the words of The Guardian journalist Steven Poole, the novel completed Gibson's development "from science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future".