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All Tomorrow's Parties

All Tomorrow's Parties

List Price: $13.95
Your Price: $10.46
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This ain't your daddy's Sci-Fi.
Review: 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.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not Gibsons' best...
Review: William Gibson is, without a doubt, the most masterful writer & predictor of the day after tomorrow. That said, I must admit "All Tomorrow's Parties" is not Gibson at his peak. Again, we're on "the Bridge", the brilliantly visualized "interstitial" community from "Virtual Light". The Bridge is one of Gibson's greatest conceits (after cyberspace) & it is always a pleasure to revisit. However, the events that bring us to this place never really seem to happen or even to be everted, & the cast of characters we are visiting it with really don't have much of a reason to be involved with the story except that Gibson seems to be stuck in the dreaded SF TRILOGY mode. Either he or his publishers seem convinced that his novels have to be published in triads ("Neuromancer", "Count Zero" & "Mona Lisa Overdrive" being the Sprawl cycle & now we have "Virtual Light", "Idoru" & "All Tomorrow's Parties" as the...what?... Bridge? cycle....)Unfortunately, this mind set does Gibson a dis-service as it requires him to stretch out stories & events that were clearly completed to his satisfaction in earlier works. "All Tomorrow's Parties" is very simply, a book in search of a plot. It seems to consist primarily of short sketches that are woven together but never really go anywhere. Gibson has introduced some new elements to his writing including a character based on himself & humor but if you're not a die hard Gibsonian this will be wasted on you. Basically, if you are unfamiliar with the man's writing, don't start here! Please, read the diamond sharp writing of "Neuromancer" or "Mona Lisa Overdrive" before picking this one up.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not much of a story really and a little too weird
Review: I keep hoping for another book as good as "Neuromancer" but not finding it. I don't think Gibson has another like that one in him. I barely finished this one and in the end was disappointed concluding that I shouldn't have bothered.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Has a sudden (and slightly incomprehensible) ending...
Review: 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.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not Bad
Review: 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.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A failure
Review: Like so many others, I thought Neuromancer was a great book. I also enjoyed Mona-Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, and Count Zero, to varying degrees. Virtual Light ... well, not much of a story there, was there? Idoru was slightly better, but all the trinkets and prose could only barely hide the lack of story; there's not even any real antagonist. In All Tomorrow's Parties the trinkets and prose fail completely. We have seen the bridge before, and it seems the only person who is in love with it is William Gibson himself.

"Something big is going to happen" chapter after chapter tells us, but you start to suspect more and more that the author will fail to show us anything. Trust your instincts. Nothing is shown. The "nodal point" is never to be seen, and you get no hint whatsoever about what kind of change has been made in the world, if any, or where it would lead, if anywhere. Gibson fails to provide a conclusion, leaving the end just as hollow as the rest of the book. All we get is some surrealism with the antagonist physically disappearing into the "flow of information" sort of.

So we have the Walled City, the Bridge, cameras hanging from balloons, a drug called dancer, a chain of supermarkets with cameras by the entrance. Then we have a bunch of characters moving to and fro on the bridge, discussing it constantly to mirror Gibson's fascination with his own creation, and sometimes killing each other. This is what we are offered instead of a story. I'm glad I read this book at the library instead of buying it.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: This book is pointless
Review: I'll give it two stars only because as a reveiwer's quote from the cover says, he's a great "stylist." I'm used to think I was a huge Gibson fan, but this book left completely cold. The story lines are pointless, characters poorly developed, and the conclusion is a big yawn.

Don't waste your money on this one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Like Pulp Fiction...only post apocalyptic, with computers...
Review: I had to read this book twice, the first time through, the first 100 pages or so were a little slow. The stories were just a little to spaced apart for me, and having only read Neuromancer, the characters seemed to rapidly introduced. The last half of the book, however, moved so rapidly, and combined all of the seemingly disjointed storylines from the first half into a smooth flowing mind blowing cataclysmic conclusion. Wow. The second time I read the book, which was after reading Idoru, and Virtual Light, (the other two books in the Rydell/Chevette/Colin Laney/Yamazaki/The Bridge saga) I was absolutely floored. This confirmed my hypothesis, Gibson is a Genious, and his works should be on everyone's shelves, regardless of their degree of technophilia.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A stimulation to the gray cells...
Review: A brilliantly futuristic, 'digital' writing style, rich with metaphors that border on the surreal and a thought-provoking storyline leaves the reader with a faint tingling in the peripheral nerve endings. Woven around the principles of tomorrow's sciences - nanotechnology, virtual reality - 'All Tomorrow's Parties' is part thriller, part sci-fi and part a work of postmodern literature.

In speaking of 'wind farms', 'money in little tabs of plastic', 'nanobots', Gibson fast-forwards us to an era in the future. At the same time, he throws open the door to a new interpretation of history that is definitely mind-bending. His hypothesis: in every epoch, since the dawn of time, there have been 'nodal points', the points from which change emerges.

He speaks of such a 'change' again...

A set of apparently disjointed events flow in a linear progression until they all converge at a vortex. This is where it all ends, or rather begins - The Golden Gate Bridge. Colin Laney, who has the uncanny ability to predict the future by interpreting the 'data flow' around him; Tessa, an Australian media student at Los Angeles; Rydell, an ex-cop; Fontaine, a collector of antique watches; Cody Harwood, a megalomaniacal media mogul; Rei Toei, a beautiful, virtual icon, all converge at San Francisco. They are present at a decisive juncture in space and time to witness something, something which will alter the course of their destiny, their futures.

Grab a copy if you want to stroke your gray cells!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: You have to be kidding...
Review: I'm a William Gibson fan, but it's incomprehensible how anyone could describe this book as even remotely readable.


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