All Tomorrow's Parties: Summary and book reviews of All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson, plus links to an excerpt from All Tomorrow's Parties and a biography of William Gibson.
All Tomorrow's Parties
by William Gibson
Hardcover: Oct 1999,
277 pages.
Paperback: Aug 2000,
255 pages.
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.
Wired Magazine
So many sharp knives slice elegantly through the
virtual realities and nanotechnological macguffins that populates
Gibson's latest novel. And appropriately so. When Gibson, one of science
fiction's greatest literary stylists, is at his best, he offers visceral
detail ("helicopters swarming like dragonflies") even when
promising transcendent change ("the mother of all nodal points"
-- a moment in the near future when the fabric of daily life will twist
profoundly).
Gibson wouldn't be Gibson if he spelled it out, if he eliminated all the
ambiguity. His specialty is hanging on to that fractal edge without ever
going over the brink.
Kirkus Reviews
Harwood plans to build a network of nanotech replicators, presently forbidden by most governments. Rydell's package is a projector containing the virtual personality, or idoru, Rei Toei. Harwood's shadowy assassin, Konrad, refuses to kill Rydell, and the characters converge at the Bay Bridge for a conclusion that's as strange as it is baffling. This familiar, vigorous, vividly realized scenario is set forth in the author's unique and astonishingly textured proseindeed, in Gibson's books the texture is the plotbut the unfathomable ending will satisfy few.
LIbrary Journal
A master of the cyberpunk genre, Gibson excels at visually exciting storytelling. A good selection for Science Fiction collections.
Publishers Weekly
Gibson is in fine form in his seventh novel, a fast-paced, pyrotechnic sequel to Idoru.....Gibson breaks little new thematic ground with this novel, but the cocreator of cyberpunk takes his readers on a wild and exciting ride filled with enough off-the-wall ideas and extended metaphors to fuel half a dozen SF tales.
Booklist
Although most of the action occurs in the "meat" world, Gibson's vision is inextricably linked to the advent of the Internet, whose possibilities he envisioned in the book that made him a big sf name, Neuromancer (1984).
Crowley draws us into a cosmic tug-of-war between familiarity and strangeness. Dæmonomania is a journey into the very mystery of existence: what is, what went before, and what could break through at any moment in our lives.
Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange.
These are 2 of the 4 readalike suggestions for All Tomorrow's Parties. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
Full Story
Kirkus Reviews
