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Brings back Colin Laney, the man whose special sensitivities about people and events let him predict certain aspects of the future.
Gibson remains, like Raymond Chandler, an
intoxicating stylist." --The New York Times Book Review
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. Laney has realized that the disruptions everyone
expected to happen at the beginning of the year 2000, which in fact did not
happen, are still to come. Though down-and-out in Tokyo, his sense of what is to
come tells him that the big event, whatever it is, will happen in San Francisco.
He decides to head back to the United States--to San Francisco--to meet the
future.
The Washington Post praised Idoru as "beautifully written, dense
with metaphors that open the eyes to the new, dreamlike, intensely imagined,
deeply plausible." A bestseller across the country (it reached #1 in Los
Angeles and San Francisco), and a major critical success, it confirmed William
Gibson's position as "the premier visionary working in SF today" (Publishers
Weekly). All Tomorrow's Parties is his next brilliant achievement.
Chapter One: Cardboard City
Through this evening's tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid
hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single
organism into the station's airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook
clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately
successful marine species.
Evolved to cope with jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shopping bags, ruthless
briefcases, Yamazaki and his small burden of information go down into the neon
depths. Toward this tributary of relative quiet, a tiled corridor connecting
parallel escalators.
Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked with
dust-furred ventilators, smoke detectors, speakers. Behind the columns, against
the far wall, derelict shipping cartons huddle in a ragged train, improvised
shelters constructed by the city's homeless. Yamazaki halts, and in that moment
all the oceanic clatter of commuting feet ...
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The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant
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