All Tomorrow’s Parties

by William Gibson


In All Tomorrow’s Parties we are given a dark vision of a ‘post-post-industrialized’ America (as one of Gibson’s own characters put it) where the rule of law applies equally to everyone, as long they aren’t too far from the police station.

The result of having volunteered to try an experimental drug, Laney is able to sense the coming of monumental events through the ‘data flow’ on the internet. He doesn’t like what he ‘sees’ for the future, and thinks he knows who’s behind it, so sends agents into the real world to change what he sees from cyberspace.

Rydell is a wannabe cop who Laney sends looking for Harwood, a god-like character that Laney ‘feels’ may be the one behind the next event that will ‘change the world as we know it’. Rydell has good intentions but has a hard time in their execution, ending up bruised and battered for his efforts.

Chevette ends up getting twisted into the plot, but for some reason I don’t remember if Laney has asked her to. She runs into Rydell, who is an old ex-boyfriend, while she is trying to avoid her latest ex-boyfriend at a bar on ‘the bridge’ where Chevette used to live.

Rydell is in possession of something Gibson calls an idoru. It is a holographic projector that contains the virtual person of someone called Rei Toei. Rei Toei is a woman who has never existed in the flesh, yet she is a sentient creature. She is also central to the big ‘event’ Laney has predicted.

I’m really not interested in delving too deeply into the main event of the book. For me Gibson’s writings are appealing in how he sees the future. The gadgets he creates are worth the price of admission. The idoru, (which could be a made-up word; he did coin the word ‘cyber-space’ after all) is a genius idea on its own; one he liked so much he wrote a whole novel around it. And though a lot his gadgets don’t exist, (as far as I know . . .) he doesn’t stray too far from the probable.

Most writers of science fiction tend to concentrate on either the hardware or the social/cultural aspects of the future, where Gibson blends the two seemlessly in his bleak future-visions. In Gibson’s future smoking is illegal, and people live on suspension bridges that are barred from automobile traffic due to structural damage caused by an earthquake. They are dressed in what may or may not be clothing, and they fall in love with the avatar of no one who ever existed. They live in cardboard boxes while saving the world by surfing the internet.

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