All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson
Overall Review: Exhilarating and punchy, All Tomorrow’s Parties is another excellent cyberpunk book from William Gibson. It’s fast-paced and immensely fun, filled with techno-jargon and dystopian near-future scenarios that still hold up 25 years later. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys dense, action-packed science fiction, especially if you like the cyberpunk genre or any of Gibson’s other work.
Synopsis: In a futuristic cyberpunk setting, three people are trying to navigate a looming technological event. Laney is a man with uncanny data abilities who is plugged into cyberspace from a homeless encampment in Tokyo. Chevette is a scrappy young woman from a large self-governing slum on the Bay Bridge. Rydell is a disgraced former cop sent to San Francisco on a mysterious mission. Together they must navigate the strange world around them as they are swept up in the power struggles of cyberspace.
A few years ago I read William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy and found it to be smart, sophisticated science fiction. Since then I’ve kept my eyes out for more Gibson and picked up All Tomorrow’s Parties after my parents found it at a yard sale. The book is a ton of fun, filled with jargon and immersive storytelling. I often found myself re-reading pages to absorb the subtleties of what each character was saying.
I’m a little mad at myself though for not realizing this book was the third in a trilogy! I only realized after I’d finished the book and opened the Amazon listing to write this review. I have a bad habit of picking up books that look interesting and realizing halfway through that I’m reading a sequel. That said, it’s a testament to Gibson’s writing that I was able to enjoy the whole book without realizing I had skipped the first two. It’s self-contained and doesn’t rely on previous installments. Gibson is good at this in general – Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive and Agency are all excellent standalone stories that don’t require reading their predecessors.
Gibson is also a master of worldbuilding through ambiguity, something which is sorely missing in a lot of science fiction. His characters reference unknown events and technologies from their world while providing enough hints to give the reader a rough understanding of what they’re referring to. A great example of this in All Tomorrow’s Parties is an off-handed reference Rydell makes to a CNN broadcast of Northern and Southern California becoming their own states. He mentions this so off-handedly that it’s easy to miss, but that one side comment fleshes out so much more of the world by indicating the deep political divide of Rydell’s California. Gibson could have written paragraphs of expository monologue detailing the California split and all the fragmentation it caused, but by instead having the characters navigate the instability themselves he achieves the same result more compellingly. Too often science fiction writers have an urge to share every detail of the world they’ve built with readers, to go into every gory detail of the setting they’ve envisioned. This is especially prevalent in Hollywood’s current obsession with “Cinematic Universes”, and how every side character from Star Wars and Marvel films is being followed up with big-budget blockbuster movies. Gibson’s approach is a more ambiguous form of storytelling but one that works much better.
I also love that Gibson places a few unique ideas at the core of each of his stories. He’s really good at this too – his breakout novel Neuromancer pioneered cyberspace (a term he coined which is now ubiquitous) as a key element to the story and effectively invented the cyberpunk genre. One of the central concepts of All Tomorrow’s Parties is the self-governing slum on the Bay Bridge. In the story, San Francisco was hit with a massive earthquake which rendered the Bay Bridge structurally unsound for vehicles. Rather than abandon it, hundreds of people moved into the bridge and set up ramshackle living quarters on it. It’s a full city with restaurants, businesses, and homes – but no rule of law and where property ownership is on an “if you occupy it, you own it” basis. Much of the book is spent on the characters navigating the chaos of the bridge and the environment’s evolution. They notice over time there’s more tourism and mainstream businesses are setting up shop. The premise is foreign, scary, and oddly realistic.
However, I don’t think the book is for everyone. The writing is dense and full of invented techno-jargon. The characters and settings are somewhat hard to decipher. Relationships between characters and major events aren’t always expressed explicitly. It’s smartly written and the ambiguity of the world is incredibly captivating, but you’re not likely to appreciate it unless you already enjoy science fiction or cyberpunk and read the story closely.
Regardless, I highly recommend All Tomorrow’s Parties, especially if you like Gibson’s other work. The book is exhilarating from start to finish and is cyberpunk world-building at its finest. While you’re at it, check out his other work like the Sprawl Trilogy and Peripheral (which recently got an Amazon TV show).