All Tomorrow's Parties Author:William Gibson 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 gi... more »rlfriend, 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.« less
My husband says: Fun read. Good Gibson if you like Gibson, but not as visionary as his greatest books (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdive trilogy, Burning Chrome).
Gibson is just such a great writer. His imagery isn't distracting as one reads it, but has a way of transforming the most mundane things into the exotic and futuristic. His settings are often barely sci-fi - but the way he talks about them, they seem as if they are. Leads to philosophical musings about - it's all in how you look at the world....
'All Tomorrow's Parties' is a sequel to Virtual Light and Idoru, but works as a stand-alone as well. Not much actually happens in the book. It's more about setting, characters, concepts.
Ex-cop Rydell is now working as a security guard at a chain convenience store, when he gets an offer to do a mysterious 'job' for his friend Laney, which sends him to a squatter's community of The Bridge. Escaping an abusive ex-boyfriend, former bike messenger Chevette also returns to the Bridge, towed by a more bourgeoise friend, a film student bent on documenting the Bridge's "interstitial" community. Meanwhile, Laney, ill in a homeless man's cardboard box in Japan, remains online, perceiving, with the abilities given him by experimental drugs, the convergence of a nodal point, which could mean the end of the world.
Of course, the AI 'idoru' Rei Tei, is involved as well...