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Mar 19, 2009

Kevin rated it:

Review – All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson

Articles about William Gibson usually talk about his weird ability to predict the future. I’m going to stay true to that form here, because one of the joys of reading old science fiction – not that All Tomorrow’s Parties, published in 1999, is really that old yet – is picking out what it was right or wrong about.

Anyway, to the list of things Gibson has envisioned before they existed, we can now add the Facebook. The flight More...

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Jan 29, 2012

Rhodes rated it:

This is 'Future Noir'. That's what he does. Seems like he invented it. A crashing good read, but I came out wondering what happened.

Nice short chapters read as prose poems. Good book for waiting. For anything.

Leading the chapters with pronouns, without reference, keeps me puzzling for a while - "who's he talking about?" - sometimes I figure it out; sometimes I don't.

Colorful, greasy, mechy-techy, always a lower class view of world changing, and More...

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May 05, 2010

Fred rated it:

Inside a cardboard box in a Tokyo subway station, Colin Laney sees the end of the world.

Or, perhaps, the beginning.

What do a down-on-his-luck rent-a-cop, a sentient Artificial Intelligence construct, a wealthy power broker, a global chain of convenience stores, and a faceless assassin have in common? Not even Colin Laney knows for sure, but somehow, they’re all intimately connected to a turning point in human history–a massive paradigm shift that’s going to begin in San Franc More...

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Apr 29, 2010

Saskia Marijke rated it:

A sci-fi story about future homeless living on a now defunct Golden Gate Bridge and their survival skills. One of the bridge's inhabitants comes back home with a friend to shoot a documentary at the same time that a time conglomerate world-wide event that will shift life as we know it, is about to take place. This is being predicted by a mental man hiding in a cardboard box in the subways of Japan because as an orphaned boy he was chemically experimented on and the side effects give him powers More...

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Nov 23, 2008

Krom rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Aug 29, 2011

Martin rated it:

This was the first Gibson book I've read, and I realized, late, that I've been reading the "bridge trilogy" out of sequence. This helped to explain why I was having such a difficulty in following the narrative. To be honest, I think I'm done with the "bridge trilogy" for now. After finishing this, the final book in the sequence, I don't have the energy to go back to the beginning. Now, hold on... I'm not done with Gibson, if that's what you were thinking. I'm merely done More...

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Jan 29, 2012

Allan rated it:

This is the book that inspired me to try writing science fiction myself. At the time I read this, my expertise was seeing patterns in disparate data types (I was a scientist at the time). The way in which Gibson captured this sort of thinking and then made it into science fiction through postulating a drug that enhances these abilities but ultimately leads to psychosis was brilliant. The major question in the book--is something major about to happen in the world or is the protagonist insane, More...

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May 22, 2010

Joe rated it:

Love this book! William Gibson writes some beautiful prose. The world he creates is utterly realistic. The book takes place in a near future world with technology that is easily recognizable. What I've always loved about Gibson is that his future worlds aren't crazy departures from reality, but, rather, take reality and go to logical evolutions. This book was written over a decade ago, and still seems like a vision of the future.

The tech that exists in this book, but not in real More...

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Feb 07, 2012

Kat rated it:

When he was a child in an orphanage in Florida, Colin Laney participated in a research study in which he was given a drug that allows him to visualize and extract meaningful information from endless streams of internet data. Laney now has the ability to see nodal points in history — times and places where important changes are occurring. Even though he doesn’t recognize what the change will be, he “sees the shapes from which history emerges.”

Laney is now an adult who’s sick and livin More...

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Jul 30, 2011

Jake rated it:

I wasn't sure I'd like this one. I had originally wanted to pick up a copy of Gibson's The Difference Engine, but the public library here didn't have it, and instead I elected to try All Tomorrow's Parties. Glad I did in hindsight. Pretty decent read. Gibson does a good job forging an engaging narrative of a future wrought with communities of disenfranchised, impoverished people living outside of societal norms in situations equivalent to Brazilian favelas, a modularization of the rest of soc More...

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Jan 07, 2012

Isabel added it

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney's hollowed eyes. "It's all going to change, Yamazaki. We're coming up on the mother of all nodal points. I can see it, now. It's all going to change."
"I don't understand."
"Know what the joke is? It didn't change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I've been looking at histo More...

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Aug 30, 2009

Christopher rated it:

A long time ago I tried to read Neuromancer and, I think, The Difference Engine and I couldn't figure out what was happening. I guess I faded out of those books and never finished them. Or else, I finished them but they had so little impact on me that I can't remember finishing them. This time I thought "I'm going to read this whole book no matter what." Well I finally finished All Tomorrow's Parties and I don't really have any idea what it was about. I was more than 3/4 of the way thr More...

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Nov 30, 2011

Javier rated it:

I just finished the Bridge Trilogy, and these books reminded me why I like William Gibson's novels so much. The book is about a cast of characters that are affected by "nodal points", theoretical tipping points in history that are visible through the analysis of large amounts of data. Gibson's prose makes the story flow very well, with the characters moving through the plot in a very realistic way. The anachronisms of these books remind you that the author has predicted most of the More...

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Dec 28, 2009

Graham rated it:

I normally hate sci-fi oriented material, but I'll stand by William Gibson (and Philip Dick) for any futuristic fix I might need.

While there were interesting ideas put forth in this (the idea of the death of bohemia due to the ubiquity of communications technology was interesting), I didn't realize when I dove in that this was the last book of a trilogy, and therefore not the easiest thing in the world to follow without the proper background information. Not bad by any stretch of th More...

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May 24, 2011

Andreas rated it:

The Bridge trilogy consists of:

Virtual Light
Idoru
All Tomorrow’s Parties

This series of three books is very loosely connected through some of the central characters. Although Gibson’s prose stands out as always, I felt that these novels were more an exercise in writing in a cool fashion than actual attemts at storytelling. The writing is even more florid and pared back than in the Sprawl Trilogy, and the books are not terribly interesting in their own righ More...

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Aug 12, 2011

Stanislav added it

Great finish of the trilogy from the grandmaster of what-will-be. Gibson continues painting the world where, unknowingly to most participants, something big is unfolding. I can't say the ultimate finish surprised me much, but the storyline kept me on the edge wanting more page after page. I have seen the nodal points, I have seen the connections...I just needed to comprehend what I was seeing in front of me. I understood through actions of Chevette, Ridell and Laney. The world will never be the More...

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Jan 08, 2009

Chris rated it:

I don't have a whole lot to say about this book. I read it about three years ago, and I probably wouldn't have read it again except that I needed a book for a flight and it was the best option immediately available in the used bookstore I stopped at. It's a perfectly competent piece of work but it doesn't grab my attention the way my favorite Gibson novels, Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, do. It feels like a retread of the former, sharing many of the same elements without quite the same More...

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Nov 09, 2009

Laurie rated it:

This is one of those books where you keep reading, hoping it will all finally click, and you will understand what the f$%& is going on. But at 80 pages in, I'm not hopeful this will come to be. There are moments of pure literary talent as Gibsons' astute eye captures the tastes and smells of his characters' spaces in time (or times in space) like no other. But however much I really feel like I'm there, it's like being somewhere but being really, really high--so I have no idea what is going on an More...

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Jun 22, 2011

Jim rated it:

My friends have been telling me for years how great Gibson is and, when I came across a free copy of this book, I let it sit on my shelf for 5 years before diving in a few weeks ago.

I was surpised by the low ratings on this site, but after 60 pages, I too was let down. Seemed to be a by the numbers sci-fi/cyberpunk book, even though it was written in 1999 and some of the ideas were certainly ahead of their time (although some seem antiquated or at least very familiar in 2010, such a More...

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Jun 28, 2010

James rated it:

My friends have been telling me for years how great Gibson is and, when I came across a free copy of this book, I let it sit on my shelf for 5 years before diving in a few weeks ago.

I was surpised by the low ratings on this site, but after 60 pages, I too was let down. Seemed to be a by the numbers sci-fi/cyberpunk book, even though it was written in 1999 and some of the ideas were certainly ahead of their time (although some seem antiquated or at least very familiar in 2010, such a More...

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Mar 26, 2010

Mike rated it:

It's been a while since I read any Gibson. I'd always meant to finish this trilogy but could never find the last book. I picked it up to take a break from something else I'm reading. I've always enjoyed Gibson's narrative style, the neat visuals (what he calls 'eye pops') and his "big ideas" that many good SF stories have. The Bridge trilogy, and this book in particular, reads like good detective fiction in a lot of ways. It's fast paced and only slows down enough to give you enou More...

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Feb 25, 2009

Johnny rated it:

Ah, cyberpunk! Norman Spinrad declared the genre to be dead in one of his Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction rants of the early 90s. To be sure, other authors have tried to go different directions as with the retro-subgenres known as “steampunk” and “dieselpunk.” Neither has reached any critical mass of acceptance, though both are still interesting to me as an individual reader. Indeed, even though the “noble Norman” hath said that cyberpunk is dead, one can still savor the Neal Stephens More...

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Jul 25, 2010

Hannah rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Jul 22, 2008

Alan rated it:

This book falls squarely between Gibson's cyberpunk period and his post-cyberpunk contemporary work. Moving away somewhat from the cyberpunk theme that wars can be fought over snippets information, now instead information is something to be acquired, manipulated, and then distorted into whatever one needs it to be.

Whereas in previous books, the villains often run a trans-national pharmaceutical company hiding the existence of a cure for an epidemic they make far more money treatin More...

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Oct 04, 2007

Derek rated it:

This is a Gibson story that has slipped through the cracks of my bookshelf for far too long. However now that I've read it, I'll put it back in those cracks. It's a story set in the same universe as "Idoru" and "Virtual Light" (maybe more?), with character crossovers and clever little tie-ins between books. And certainly Gibson excels at creating the world of tomorrow, building on the grungy future of Blade Runner (to name a prominent example) with things like a makeshift More...

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Oct 08, 2007

Ben rated it:

I... I've got something to admit. I love Law & Order, the long-running TV show. It's pretty much the same show over and over, but it's got guts and grit, archetype characters and grubby scenescapes. The pattern is familiar, but endlessly entertaining. Upon repeated viewings, characters deepen, the well-worn grooves become familiar, making the viewer all the more aware of differences. In many ways, it's like the best of serial comic fiction. The comfort of the canon, the excitement of the " More...

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May 08, 2010

Sunny rated it:

I came to this book years after reading Idoru, and as such I feel like I missed some things that would have otherwise made perfect sense. As this is the third book of a trilogy, that makes a certain amount of sense; still, it's worth knowing going in. Aside from that, this is an enjoyable enough read and at times moves up into the truly wonderful. Gibson's prose is as fabulous as ever, and even when you're not entirely sure what's going on--the frequency of which may grate on some people--it is More...

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Jan 15, 2009

Barrett rated it:

It's odd to me that this book was so epic and mysterious and life-changing as a youth, but upon reading it now it's merely a good story, although in a bare-bones style which always leaves me imagining the rest of the details he has left out. And Wanting more. It helps that this is a continuation of Virtual Light and a few other Gibson books, which I never realized as a kid. Maybe it's just a sign of the times that Gibson is no longer so far fetched as a sci-fi writer.

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Jan 09, 2012

Jordan rated it:

Each book in this series only merits three stars in my opinion, but the trilogy taken as a whole is worthy of four stars. Virtual Light was slow going for me at times and I felt like the plot wasn't very exciting. Idoru picked up considerably with the introduction of Laney's abilities to see nodal points and the AI, Rei Toei, and I became much more involved in the plot. In All Tomorrow's Parties we see the return of several characters from the previous two novels and the culmination of events bo More...

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Jan 18, 2011

Lee rated it:

Having read all of Gibson's previous books, I was prepared for another look at a not so distant and easily believable future. What I got instead was a collection of partially realized sketches and thinly fleshed out characters. Lots of atmosphere, the usual Gibson grittiness, but no real substance. Compressed and re-edited, this book would make a great first three chapters or so of a much better Gibson novel.

One annoying fact of this book is that it has a classic Gibson ending.. withou More...

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