All Tomorrow's Parties

Gibson, William. All Tomorrow's Parties. New York: Putnam, 1999. New York: Ace, 2000.

Sequel to Idoru and to Virtual Light, still important for students of the postmodern and posthuman (see Ace ch. 39, "Panopticon," and p. 193 [ch, 47] on entropic visions in cyberspace). There is about to be a great change, comparable to the one in 1911, which we assume was the one into the definitely modern world. Finding and using the nodes in the tech-world's data indicating that change is central to the plot, as is Rei Toei: the idoru, Colin Laney: who can perceive the nodes in the data, and Silencio: a boy fascinated by watches and data-flow. Note (1) that the cyberspace of WG's "Sprawl" series — Neuromancer et al. — or even in Idoru has been replaced by more mundane movement through the data of DatAmerica; (2) that ATP incorporates something of a Daoist worldview; and (3) that the villain of the piece is Cody Harwood, "the PR [Public Relations] genius, who'd inherited Harwood Levine, the most powerful PR firm in the world" (15; ch. 3). See also for literal clockworks in watches, continuing interest in nanotechnology, and various interesting gadgets, including "God's Little Toy": a small, remotely controlled balloon camera-platform—"silver balloon. Disembodied eye" (34; ch. 7). (RDE, 02/12/01; 26/12/01)