Gibson's whole world construct is getting dangerously close, 2 Dec 1999

William Gibson gives us the third part in his trilogy that began with Virtual Light passed through Idoru and has now landed up as All Tomorrows Parties. This is an excellent return to form to his first days on the cyber block and the electric Neuromancer. This novel set hearts aglow when the gleam in our eyes was a shiny new 286 PC with DOS or a Classic Mac which when supercharged would run at 33mhz.
(Wait a minute I still write this on an old Mac that runs at 33mhz). So much would be possible in his portrait of suburban and urban decay, places where ubiquitous corruption and life insecurity were the norm. A life stained by drugs and corporate mafia, viral, invasive, even toxic software and this was a complete vision of a world gone to hell. Now we are actually on our way there and Nuspeak is the official language of Millbank, we now know that Gibson was John the Baptist and Christmas Day is coming folks. All Tomorrows Parties seems to be about a bridge. Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, circa 2011. It has most of the characters of the former books running through their little tricks and electronic idols are properly worshipped. But now we are whisked away from Japan to the sure footing of his future USA. Gibsons portrait of his America is so complete and plausible we can see it as the Gibson veneer. In his post-net world, where the web is invisibly embedded into our fractured lives he touches on all our insecurities in this one. Just because our society isn't quite like this yet, it doesn't mean Gibson is wrong. His is the most likely scenario. There are already many no-go areas in the USA and in some parts of California or New York in particular, drugs have taken over local economies. The Yardies in New York with their ruthless expansion of the drug dealing culture serve as a warning as to what it will be like in our future. It was reported only this month by the BBC that Afghanistan controls 72% of the worlds supply of Opium. This is their economy. Incessant war has seen to it that there is nothing else. In All Tomorrows Parties the bridge houses the people disenfranchised by progress. They live, they barter, they cling to the bridges in a spiders web of plastic entrails, nests rather than homes. The real city, where people consume, go to Lucky Dragon convenience stores and seemingly live real city lives, nanotechnology is on the cusp of changing what people do and how they do it. Drugs are bought and sold everywhere and gone from the landscape are the things we take for granted now (but we can see the beginning of the change). Banks, post offices, jobs, careers are have all migrated to the phone or the web or whatever, but it is no long real, but virtual. We are all security guards, or corner store lackeys, or couriers, or hitmen or too old and shut out from Medicare and hope. (unless you are rich). It is a world where we have been niched, targeted and fragmented into target consumers and the rich live out indulgences that will kill them or become weird aesthetes. Into the Matrix (no he didn't write that, but it is very close to his work and that of the ubermaster Philip K Dick) we enter this date 2011. This is when everything comes together in some sort of critical mass of new technology, the moment when the millennium really kicks in. A similar thing happened in 1911 and so it goes with our next century.

You want details about the book? There is a drug, an experimental drug called 5-SB that they gave to Laney, the web freak, in the orphange, which gave him second sight, and then there's Chevette who is a stunning tough cookie and yet, still looks for love. Then there's Rydell, a down on his luck ex-cop whose honour is all and who loves Chevette, only she's on the run from Carson who beat on her and is looking everywhere for her. And then there's Rei Toei, the most beautiful girl in the world who isn't real, but would like to be and Harwood, who could be the Rupert Murdoch character or any media megalomaniac, who wants to seize and control of the next frontier and he's not going to let anyone stop him. The stuff that is happening now with e-commerce on the web is happening so fast we are going to wake up a decade from now and find everything we were ever certain of has gone forever and it its place will be Gibson's world. The world he paints is real enough and his construct is frighteningly plausible. Writing this review in Cornwall where superficially nothing has changed, but actually everything has changed, one can get a glimpse of his vision through the cracks. Huge local unemployment, inadequate or overpriced housing, marginalised people, shops and banks withering, empty high streets with boarded windows in many town and if there are shops, they are antique shops, just like on Gibson's bridge where the dealer obsesses about 19th century watches with real craftsmenship. We are heading back to the day of the bazaar and you can sense the discontentment. see it in action in Seattle streets.

ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES is a jest. Life will not be a party and you won't get in, not without an invitation anyway. Is the book any good? Hell yes.

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