The Bridge Trilogy

“The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” (Time) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from Idoru...Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible...

William Gibson, who predicted the Internet with Neuromancer, takes us into the millennium with a brilliant new novel about the moments in history when futures are born.

Salon - Frank Houston

William Gibson is so secure in his status as a prophet of the digital age that it's easy to forget he's been publishing novels for just 15 years -- about as long as the Apple Macintosh has been around. But the computer revolution is all the history Gibson needs for his books; he combines it with old-fashioned notions of character and suspense and skews his novels hyperkinetically forward in time. A futurist who plays games with the present, Gibson imbues his stories with elements of technology both recognizable and unfathomable.

In his first novel, Neuromancer, he explored the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace (he coined the word himself, in a 1981 short story), navigated by hackers and elegant forms of artificial intelligence who appear as ghosts in the machine. Idoru (1996) is set in 21st century Tokyo, where Rez, the lead singer in a rock band, becomes engaged to a pop singer named Rei Toei, a synthetic "idoru" simulated holographically by software agents. Rez's personal security detail hires Net runner Colin Laney, who can detect obscure patterns in electronic data and thereby predict aspects of the future, to ease their worries about the strange nuptials.

In his new novel, All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson taps the vein of our cultural angst where it runs nearest to the surface: millennialism. He returns here to Colin Laney and Rei Toei, as well as to characters from 1993's Virtual Light, which, like All Tomorrow's Parties, is set in NoCal and SoCal (the two states that formerly constituted California) in the not too distant future. In his now familiar collision-course style, Gibson hurtles his cast toward San Francisco and the "cusp of some unprecedented potential for change" -- the kind of widespread social disruption everyone had expected way back at the turn of the millennium.

Something in the air here points toward the lawless and decentralized distant future Gibson envisioned in Neuromancer, in which "the multinationals that shaped the course of human history had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality." This novel is about the end of the world as we know it. Laney is still in Tokyo, strung out on data and living in a cardboard box in a subway station. He can sense that something big is about to happen. But all he is sure of is that it involves the famously famous Cody Harwood -- a "twenty-first century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen" -- and that he has to stop him from attaining his nefarious (if obscure) goal.

Writing at flame intensity, Gibson conjures a world that seems just a breath away from the here and now. All Tomorrow's Parties fits into his unfolding story of the next century, a time of darkness and decaying cities. A sense of claustrophobia permeates the book, with characters living in boxes, coffin-like rooms and vans. The motif of transition -- of being between things, or "interstitial," as one character puts it -- runs through the tale, which builds to a climax literally between two cities, amid the ruins of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which has been closed to traffic after a massive earthquake (the "Little Big One") and transformed into a rundown bazaar.

Gibson has trouble making his endings as vivid and precise as all the details leading up to them, and All Tomorrow's Parties suffers in this respect. The ultimate conflict has to do with introducing nanotechnology -- a manufacturing process on the molecular level -- to the mass market. In the real world, nanotech is actually being researched and developed, by the Pentagon among others. Outrunning the future can be tough in the digital age. You have to hand it to Gibson for managing, once more, to stay at least one step ahead.

Although Colin Laney (from Gibson's earlier novel Idoru ) lives in a cardboard box, he has the power to change the world. Thanks to an experimental drug that he received during his youth, Colin can see "nodal points" in the vast streams of data that make up the worldwide computer network. Nodal points are rare but significant events in history that forever change society, even though they might not be recognizable as such when they occur. Colin isn't quite sure what's going to happen when society reaches this latest nodal point, but he knows it's going to be big. And he knows it's going to occur on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, which has been home to a sort of SoHo-esque shantytown since an earthquake rendered it structurally unsound to carry traffic. Although All Tomorrow's Parties includes characters from two of Gibson's earlier novels, it's not a direct sequel to either. It's a stand-alone book. --Craig E. Engler All Tomorrow's Parties is the final novel in the Bridge trilogy. From his cardboard box in the Tokyo subway, connected to the Internet, a clairvoyant cyberpunk mobilizes his friends to avert a world disaster. It is due to occur on a bridge in San Francisco, now home to squatters, and is part of a rich man's bid for world domination. THROUGH THIS EVENING'S tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the-station's airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species. Rydell is on his way back to San Francisco. A stint as a security man in a Los Angeles convenience store has convinced him his career is going nowhere, but his friend phoning from Tokyo, says there's more interesting work for him in Northern California. And there is