Customer Reviews

All Tomorrow's Parties

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I've been a longstanding fan of Gibson's cyberpunk work since his groundbreaking novel, Neuromancer. This book continues his legacy of well-developed characters from the underbelly of the city. Gibson's virtuosity of prose is best shown in his vivid descriptions of the homeless living in Japan in a city of cardboard boxes.

Gibson's continual obsession with Japanese culture continues in this novel, and any anime otaku (extreme fan) will find many tributes to the pop culture of Japan. His finely tuned attention to detail in the scenes set in Japan made for highly entertaining reading.

In All Tommorow's Parties, we find ourselves once again associated with many of the characters in his previous novels, Idoru and Virtual Light. (Fortunately, the reader is not expected to 'know' these characters, so a previous reading of Idoru or Virtual Light will not preclude your enjoyment of this novel.)

However, by mid-novel, all this talk of nodal points fails to satisfy the reader - Gibson assumes too much of our understanding of the world that he has illustrated for us. Hints and allegations are made as to the significance of nodal points (that these points have the potential to bend the course of human history) but then these hints are never truly realized in any major way at the end of the novel. The novel ends suddenly, with no real feeling of resolution of the action that has come before. (I almost felt as if someone may have ripped the 'real' last chapter out of my copy.) We are dropped suddenly into this ending that does not seem nearly as elegantly constructed as the events leading up to it. Gibson's conclusions at the end of the novel are hardly cut-and-dry -- it takes work on the reader's part to try to understand his ending.

In conclusion, it's a worthy read, however, you may find yourself disappointed with the ending.

Gibson ,who created the word "cyberspace" and who was describing the "matrix" before Keanu put on black spandex, has kept his position solid as the king of sci-fi. While he'll probably never top his own book "Neuromancer" which is the only book in history to win the Neubla,Phillip K. Dick and Hugo award at once."All Tommorrow's Parties" is chock full of suprises and unites characters from "Virtual Light" and "Idoru" and brings in new characters. The book hits high notes with it's use of cool tech toys and all too human characters the world he creates is a reflection of our own for it is our own his children are our children.Gibson's writing style packs a punch you'll be feeling for the rest of the month because it presents a reality that'd make a Goth kid's website look like disney.com.This book also has more twists and turns than an Egyptian labyrinth and at the end you'll put the book down blink and want to start over again.

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.

Having liked both 'Idoru' and 'Virtual Light', I was excited to hear that ATP was going to include the characters from both of the previous books. However, the new book, while not terrible, is really devoid of anything exciting and the characters aren't developed any further than they already were. In particular, Laney's representation in the book is extremely one-dimensional and meaningless. The others aren't a lot better either.

All in all, when I finished ATP, I couldn't shake the impression that this book was written to fulfill contractual obligations that Gibson had to the publisher. At least I'd like to hope so, because the alternative is that his originality is beginning to dry up.

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.

i thought this book was really good.

i've been a fan of gibson's ever since i first read neuromancer, and although his language usually far outshines the plot and characters, i thought this book had a particularly strong plot, and better developed characters than the average gibson book.

not that the language isn't as beautiful and poetic as ever. i disagree with the reviewer who said "leave the poetry to the poets" - i became a fan of gibson precisely because he blurred the line between poetry and prose - all my favorite writers do.

maybe there aren't as many "cool toys" in this novel as in the previous ones. but gibson's vision of the future is still fresh and dark and wonderful as ever, and has grown up past the cool gadgets to look at another side of the future and the implications of us trying to control it and our surroundings. the lucky dragon on the bridge totally smacked of the "disney-fying of times square," and i'm sure the observant reader will find other commentaries on our current world. this book still won't replace neuromancer as my favorite gibson, but then, my experience going into neuromancer was as a virgin to the world of cyberpunk and gibson, and for me to still enjoy this book even though i am jaded and have read countless similar books says something.

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!

I don't give five star reviews easily. Nevertheless, I'll say that both stylistically and in terms of dealing with real ideas about the future, this is Gibson's best or second best book.

As others have noted, he's stylistically back to the evocative, Delaney-inspired prose that made _Neuromancer_ and so many of his short stories work so well. And the characterization is much stronger than in the previous installations of the series. It eschews the contrived "gotta have a plot" scripting of _Virtual Light_ and _Idoru_ in favor of a well-thought-out progression toward an end that, as another reviewer has noted, passes almost too quickly to see -- a typical "Gibson ending", to be sure.

As for the future he depicts.... let's just say that in its own way, it's one of the more chilling dystopias I've ever encountered, wherein society and culture are made manifest in lawsuits and trash TV, and grim hope lives out on the margins in the "autonomous zones"....

I actually really liked this one, and I'm surprised by a lot of the negative reviews below. I'm not a huge Gibson fan: I've only read Neuromancer and Idoru, but I did like both of those. A couple things caught my eye about this book when I first saw it. Gibson's style has this reputation for being ultra-cool, and the book was called All Tomorrow's Parties which is a (very good) song by the Velvet Underground, so Gibson himself get the image of being ultra-cool here (as well as of being in the know).

The plot to this one struck me as actually stronger than that of Idoru, but the writing was not as electrifying as Neuromancer. It's certainly worth reading if you like Gibson's work. If you don't or if you're just not familiar with his work, well this doesn't change much about Gibson's reputation as an author. He's still the guy who wrote Neuromancer and a bunch of cool cyber-punk books afterwards.

Disappointing. Gibson tries too hard to pull in too many characters from IDORU and Virtual Light. This books feels like Gibson is just going through the motions and his heart is really not in it. For the first time in any of his book series he reiterates (several times) parts of other books which is very irratating. If someone is reading this book then they should have read his earlier work. I hope he is not trying to make his books stand alone to sell more books. Problems with this book: Chevette's ex-boyfriend is following her to beat her up because?, Laney is online in a cardboard box in the subway (high speed internet connection for the homeless?), Chevette and Rydell do not meet until page 215, Harwood does not conclude that the Lucky Dragon nanofaxes are the big historical point when they are being installed on the same day as when something big is going to happen, Silencio is gifted with online encryption skills, how does the nanofax create humans?, another weak ending. The highlights of this book are: the Lucky Dragon concept is great (especially the monitors), Boomzilla (we all know this kid), and Laney obsessed with Harwood. Gibson only had half a book but he stretched it out with too many characters and subplots. The ending is awful. I hope Gibson come back with another great book because it has been a long time. If he would focus more on characters and the ending then we could get back to good books like Neuromancer and Virual Light. I still recommend reading this book but be prepared for disappointment.