All Tomorrow's Parties

It's going to be hard to "focus my comments on the book's content" after reading 10 or 12 of the other reviews. I guess Wells had detractors because his predictions seemed so fanciful at the time. Now in the Information Age, your detractors scour the net and the local magazine rack to make sure you haven't maybe picked up an idea thats already been around for a couple of nanoseconds. Can you imagine reviewers doing this to Clarke or Asimov? And Gibson clearly has a place in their company. Besides simply foretelling the future in Neuromancer, he started a whole new genre of speculative fiction. This book, while certainly not as ground breaking as triple award winning Neuromancer, continues the style and savvy of Hugo nominated Virtual Light. It's good to see Rydell and Chevette again and I truly enjoyed those times at the Lucky Dragon (the convenience store of the future). Read this book; it's fun.

Typecast as herald of some questionable cyber salvation -- from the body, from "meatspace" (ugh!), from (who knows) getting a Real Job -- Gibson was initially catapulted up the charts for reasons that largely missed his genuine talent, which is *writing.* I knew this on encountering the first line of Neuromancer (from memory): "The sky over the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel." Wow.And his writing has gotten better, his inner ear more attentive to the (real) real world. Never mind what he's saying. Listen to how he says it. There is genuine poetry here. Gibson should be hailed not for mapping new concepts that presaged the Internet, but for extending something very much older: the language. *That* is the ultimate consensual hallucination. Long may it wave!

Gibson always draws criticism when his latest book turns out not to be the new Neuromancer. But then, it's not 1984 any more, either. All Tomorrow's Parties is a mature work, with the previous pyrotechnics toned down and handled as much offstage as on. And the most enigmatic character bears a remarkable resemblance to the jacket photo of the author.As I read, I could hear Gibson's laconic drawl reading the words deliberately. This is definitely not a book to speed-read. Can't wait for the audio books version.

Ignore the adoloscent losers who are stuck on Neuromancer. The fact is our cyber future is not going to be filled with one dimensional badasses who do badass things to badass people with badass computers. Cyberspace is real, and it's in the here and now, and badasses line up it alongside married housewives from Chicago who talk about Beanie Babies online. This is the real future, and Gibson is not a prophet, as so many want him to be. He's someone who finds the patterns in culture at large and uses sci fi to extend or pardoy those patterns, and this new book is the culmination of an older, wiser Gibson. I mean, what better motivation can there be in the future for a character (like Rydell) than wanting to have a steady job? That pressure is tremendous and a great deal more pertinent today for millions of people than whether or not someone can crack a dbase. As well, Gibson is in person a very funny guy, and this is his first truly hilarious book, one that actually made me laugh out loud. And this is the first William Gibson book which cannot be denied, as some scholars to do his other work, actually is about something. His prose has become sharper and more lucid than before, and with this I truly think he is becoming the Cormac McCarthy of science fiction - a down south good ol boy working in an established genre and tearing it up and down. As for complaints about the ending - well you just have to look hard enough. It does make sense, and it gave me chills. I'll give you a hint: Neal Stephenson cheated nanotech by insisting that with it would come a new social order which would displace the ramifactions of a post production culture and keep us human. Gibson remains true to the essential otherworldliness of that tech and the book does end well, with a hint of a new world to come, one that cannot be expressed in language or current imagination. Fill in the blanks for yourself, grow up, figure out that the Net is just a giant strip mall with some nice communication capabilities, and read this book. Let the otaku crowd obsess because they'll never relax enough to understand.