All Tomorrow's Parties Author:William Gibson Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on Earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Toyko. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Toyko; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco... The mist... more »s of San Francisco make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his information. And Rei Toei, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she's working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible...« 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...