All Tomorrow's Parties
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.
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What Hacker News says
- The Bridge Trilogy by William Gibson (technically cyberpunk but close enough). Virtual light and all tomorrow’s parties in particular.
- OP asked about novels. Here are a few excellent novels in this genre which I highly recommend:
Soda Pop Solider by Nick Cole
Ctrl-Alt-Revolt by Nick Cole
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
Second the Vernor Vinge recommendations, and the Neal Stephenson and William Gibson Sprawl Trilogy recommendations.
Gibson's The Peripheral, as well as Pattern Recognition, Zero History, and Spook Country all apply, as well. Same for his Idoru, Virtual Light, and All Tomorrow's Parties.
Finally, Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine - the first and, so far, best steampunk novel - also qualifies, given the storyline.
- Fiction:
- The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells)
- Dune (Frank Herbert)
- The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien)
- Neuromancer (William Gibson)
- Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties (I picked up Idoru first, so I haven't yet read Virtual Light) (also Gibson)
- The Difference Engine (Gibson, Sterling)
- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
- Cryptonomicon (" ")
- Circuit of Heaven, End of Days (Dennis Danvers)
- All of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories and novels. (Fritz Leiber)
- The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula K. LeGuin)
- 'salem's Lot (Stephen King)
- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
- the Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman)
- various Cory Doctorow short stories
- Kamikaze L'Amour (Richard Kadrey)
- Lightpaths (Howard V. Hendrix)
- A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)
- Moonwar, Venus (Ben Bova)
- the Stainless Steel Rat series (Harry Harrison)
- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Ringworld (Larry Niven)
- Cthon (Piers Anthony) -- Trippiness level approaching Philip Jose Farmer ;-)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)
- The Black Company (Glen Cook)
- there's one particularly good post-cyberpunk series that takes place in a world in which Canada emerged as a major world power, but for the life of me I can't rememeber the title.
- the 1632 series (Eric Flint)... see also S. M. Stirling's Nantucket series ("Island in the Sea of Time", et al.), and H. Beam Piper's novel Kalvan of Otherwhen
Non-fiction:
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)
- the surviving words and works of Epicurus, and Diogenes the Cynic
- Freakonomics (Levitt, Dubner)
- The Gay Science (Nietzsche)
- The Jefferson Bible (Christ, Jefferson (ed.))
- The Devil's Dictionary (Bierce)
- Brain Droppings (George Carlin)
- anything by P. J. O'Rourke
- anything by Dave Barry
- Funny you would ask: I just finished All Tomorrow's Parties about a week ago, as the end of a massive read/re-read of William Gibson. I started with Neuromancer and read the Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy back to back.
I'd read everything at least once before, except Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, so this was a chance to kinda do it all at the same time, finish the stuff I had not read, and kinda have all this William Gibson in my head at more or less the same time.
Having done all that, I'll add this; if you've only read Neuromancer, or even only read just the Sprawl Trilogy, definitely consider giving the Bridge Trilogy a shot. It's markedly different in many ways, but still very Gibsonesque and definitely worth reading. The big differences, IMO, are that the Bridge Trilogy books are less "futuristic" and have less focus on tech technology qua technology, and focus more on the people and their interactions and choices, etc.
- Wait, 15 books?
Burning Chrome
Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive
The Difference Engine (w/Bruce Sterling)
Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties
Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History
The Peripheral
That's 12?
- I read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around.
For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all.
I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.)
To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.
