“All Tomorrow's Parties" is the third and final volume in William Gibson's “Bridge Trilogy".
It elaborates on the two worlds thElaborate Conclusion
“All Tomorrow's Parties" is the third and final volume in William Gibson's “Bridge Trilogy".
It elaborates on the two worlds that were introduced to us in the earlier novels – one in Japan, and the other the world of the bridge in San Francisco.
There are far more characters in this novel, even if we’ve met them in one or other of the previous works. Gibson pursues each of them to the logical limit, once again in alternating narratives (though they're not limited to two).
Dick and Pynchon
Fontaine (a new but minor character) is a specialist dealer in second-hand goods who sells quality pistols (a measure of life and death) and watches (a measure of time). His store reminded me of the one in Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle". The rest of the characters – Rydell, Laney, Chevette, Tessa – could have appeared in Thomas Pynchon's “Vineland".
Thin Wild Mercury Style
The pace of the novel mimics that of a crime novel. At times, I was tempted to describe Gibson's language in terms of a thin wild mercury style, especially when the focus was life on the bridge, and the holographic appearances of the idoru, Rei Toei.
I Adore U, Idoru
We learn more about the idoru, enough for Laney to fall in love with her, when she fails to marry Rez, the singer from the previous novel.
She is “gorgeous and quite literally glowing...an emergent system, a self being iterated from experiential input...who had been designed for Laney (and the world) to fall in love with. As the amplified reflection of desire, she was a team effort; to the extent that her designers had done their jobs properly, she was a waking dream, a love object sprung from an approximation of the global mass unconscious."
Emergent Systems of History, Data and Desire
Laney comes to realise that “history [wasn’t just a narrative...but] was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that, as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation.” Laney has learned how to apprehend “nodal points, those emergent systems of history,” even if he can't share them with Rei Toei, because she can't see them.
Revolt into Style
These nodal points, like the bridge, have replaced “bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They [bohemias] were a crucial aspect of industrial civilisation in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilisations went to dream. A sort of unconscious R & D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large.”
Perhaps, now, we are all emergent systems, selves being iterated from experiential input. Maybe, now, more than ever, each person's being is derived from their very existence and experience (even if it's located in one of the nodal points of cyberspace).
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SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ The Velvet Underground and Nico - "All Tomorrow's Parties"
This 1993 novel isn't so much set in the cyberspace of Gibson's “Neuromancer", as in the world of an imagined 2005/2006 (the exact datePreromancer
This 1993 novel isn't so much set in the cyberspace of Gibson's “Neuromancer", as in the world of an imagined 2005/2006 (the exact date doesn't seem to be mentioned in the text itself, and there's a conflict in the extrinsic evidence), after some event (perhaps an earthquake) has destroyed much of San Francisco, and California has been split into two states, NoCal and SoCal.
The technology isn't as advanced as the digital matrix in “Neuromancer", which was apparently set in the 2030's. Some people communicate by “fax", not the faxes of the 1980’s, but some type of portable videophone that has an eyepiece.
It's late-stage capitalism, rather than post-capitalism.
Archaic Courier on a Bicycle
Chevette Washington is a messenger, a courier. Unlike Y. T. in Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel, “Snow Crash" (who rides a motor bike), “she's got a job riding a bicycle around San Francisco, delivering messages.” Chevette “earns her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography.” Data needs to be moved around.
Despite the prevalence of computers, there’s no mention of the world wide web or emails. “Even if she's just riding confidential papers around San Francisco, she's a courier. She's entrusted, Rydell. The data becomes a physical thing. She carries it.” The digital world is still partly analogue. The exercise might be the reason Chevette’s bare legs are “smooth and muscular”.
Chevette steals a case containing some sunglasses and some data from an abusive asshole she meets at a party. The glasses are virtual light glasses: “There are drivers in the frames and lenses. They affect the nerves directly...It's a virtual light display...you can see the datafeed at the same time...You can see the input.”
The Business of Real Estate
It turns out that the data consists of the plans for the redevelopment of San Francisco that were supposed to be delivered to an important recipient.
“The problem is that a city like San Francisco has about as much sense of where it wants to go, of where it should go, as you do. Which is to say, very little. There are people, millions of them, who would object to the fact that this sort of plan even exists. Then there's the business of real estate...”
[image] Constant Nieuwenhuys - New Babylon
The Bridge People and Their Accretion of Dreams
The people who are likely to oppose the plans are the residents of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge who live in improvised structures they have built on the bridge with found materials.
“And that bridge, man, that's one evil motherfucking place. Those people anarchists, antichrists, cannibal motherfuckers out there, man...”
“The bridge's steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars... Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air...
“Down on the bottom deck, once you got in past a lot of food-wagons, there were mostly bars, the smallest ones Rydell had ever seen, some with only four stools and not even a door, just a big shutter they could pull down and lock... Now that he looked around, he saw lots of narrow little stairways snaking up between stalls and shuttered micro-bars, and no pattern to it at all. He guessed they all led up into the same rats-nest, but there was no guarantee they'd all connect up.”
Gibson displays a sense of humour throughout the novel. One of the bars is called “Cognitive Dissidents”. Or as one resident says, “It’s not a bar. It's a chill.”
"Modernity was Ending"
These dissidents signal not just the end of the past, but the beginning of the future. It might even be a continuum:
“We are come not only past the century's closing, the millennium's turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure... Modernity was ending. Here, on the bridge, it long since had.”
The novel is an entertaining scifi action thriller with a profound but subtle counter-cultural political message.
"Burning Chrome" is a fascinating collection of stories that chart the origin of the Sprawl Trilogy. You can watch William Gibson building tWired West
"Burning Chrome" is a fascinating collection of stories that chart the origin of the Sprawl Trilogy. You can watch William Gibson building the world of the Sprawl ("of cities and smoke"), cyberspace and the characters who would later be explored in the three novels.
Equally importantly, you can observe him developing a unique style of writing suited to this world.
It's data- and sensory-rich, almost exhausting in its detail, which is revealed without information dumps or definitions. It assumes that we're keeping up with the story and we get it, without having to have things explained to us at length.
Gibson's world is a combination of the physical world, computers, data, the matrix, cyberspace, and people who use technology to travel between these substrata.
Gibson is equally adept at finding the future in the present, and the present in the future.
Gentleman Losers
The narrators of the stories are often down on their luck technophiles and hackers who illicitly access the corporate segments of cyberspace. Gibson calls them "console cowboys", "hustlers" and "industrial espionage artists" who rustle data. They frequent saloons like "The Gentleman Loser" (named after a line in Steely Dan's "Midnight Cruiser") and visit brothels like the House of Blue Lights. This isn't the Wild West, but the Wired West, although it incorporates Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macao and Russia.
Not surprisingly, the style of some of the stories resembles that found in western novels, others resemble pulp or crime fiction.
In Recognition of a Woman's Sleeping Patterns
There are several narrators, all male. The women are talented, artistic, beautiful, adventurous, energetic, and mysterious, with exotic or kitsch names like Molly Millions, Dialta Downes, Angela, Antoinette, Leni, Charmian, (Colonel) Olga, Hillary, Valentina, Nina, Tatjana, Sandii, Lise (who records an album of her dreams called "Kings of Sleep"), Nance, and Rikki Wildside.
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Naomi Watts in "King Kong"
Where is Your Bounty of Fortune and Fame?
The final story "Burning Chrome" contains the original use of the word "cyberspace". Interestingly, it had already become the proprietary name of some computer hardware, "the Cyberspace Seven", which the narrator, Automatic Jack, repairs and customises so that he can access and burn Chrome's data towers with a Russian "glitch system" or cybernetic virus analog. Meanwhile, Jack withdraws a significant undisclosed amount of cash from Chrome's Zurich account (which stores its income from global property and prostitution assets):
"I watched zeros pile up behind a meaningless figure on the monitor. I was rich...
"I thought about Chrome, too. That we'd killed her, murdered her, as surely as if we'd slit her throat."
Despite the female face Jack subconsciously attaches to it, Gibson's corrupt new global economy was just as dependent on data as it was on cash. As were console cowboys like Jack who knew how to hack into both in pursuit of fortune and fame.
"Tell me where are you driving Midnight cruiser Where is your bounty Of fortune and fame?"
There are two alternating narratives in "Idoru". At the end, they merge and become one. "The job worked out."
Rez is the singer iAlternating Narratives
There are two alternating narratives in "Idoru". At the end, they merge and become one. "The job worked out."
Rez is the singer in a half Irish, half Chinese band called Lo/Rez, which has outstayed its welcome to (and embrace of) celebrity, and released 26 albums (not counting compilations) since their first Dylanesque-labelled "Lo Rez Skyline".
The Technology of Oneness
To the dismay of their obsessive (girl) fans, Rez has announced that he intends to marry Rei Toei, an idoru, an idol-singer, an artificial personality construct, a "software agent", a pool of data, a synthespian, a sentient hologram, "something generated, animated, projected."
Like the narrative, they progress, intending to become one, a oneness made up of a natural person and a product of technology. "Technology...is an aspect of the natural, of oneness. Through our efforts, oneness perfects itself. And popular culture is the testbed of our futurity."
To Rez, “Rei’s only reality is the realm of ongoing serial creation.” The idoru is “entirely process; infinitely more than the combined sum of her various selves. The platforms sink beneath her, one after another, as she grows denser and more complex."
Seeing Things in Clouds
Density is relevant to Laney, a "netrunner" who "liked to think of himself as a researcher". He analyses information and data, detecting patterns in the system of things, when he enters "nodal mode". Density of information is necessary to allow “nodal apprehension"."It's like seeing things in clouds...except the things you see are really there."
Laney's past experience will be familiar to readers of Christopher Steele:
"In his quest for lesser nodal points..., Laney had already affected the courses of municipal elections, the market in patent gene futures, abortion laws in the State of New Jersey, and the spin on an ecstatic pro-euthanasia movement (or suicide cult, depending) called Cease Upon The Midnight, not to mention the lives and careers of several dozen celebrities of various kinds."
Information as Narrative
For Laney, Rei was "some unthinkable volume of information." Laney once gazed at the idoru in a nightclub and automatically "fell through her eyes." She "induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative."
The Articulated Longing of/for the Infernal Desire Machine
The idoru's producer reveals that she is "the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as 'desiring machines'. Not in any literal sense, but please envision aggregates of subjective desire. It was decided that the modular array would ideally constitute an architecture of articulated longing..." (These desiring machines are reminiscent of Angela Carter's 1972 novel "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman".)
Celebrity, Desire and Banal Intimacy
Gibson investigates the nature of celebrity and desire, in much the same way as Don Delillo in "Great Jones Street". He describes the obsessive concern with the private lives of celebrities as “that terrible, banal intimacy". Unfortunately, the concern is reciprocated:
"It's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us."
A Modish Synopsis, A Modest Assemblage, A Little Looksee
It's a whole long story, and it's open to interpretation. Each chapter begins with a pronoun, A Modish Synopsis, A Modest Assemblage, A Little Looksee
It's a whole long story, and it's open to interpretation. Each chapter begins with a pronoun, or two. And then it's off like a robber's dog. I decided you and I might hit the matrix for a little looksee. You followed, forgetting your fears, forgetting the nausea and constant vertigo. You were there, and you understood this was our space, our construct. It came on, a flickering, non-linear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jumpcuts and juxtapositions. Machine dreams. Rollercoaster. It was fast, too fast, too alien to grasp. You could hallucinate in the matrix as easily as anywhere else. You looked at me through the thicket of manipulators. I came simultaneously to see that I was the focus of some vast device fuelled by an obscure desire. I kissed your mouth as it opened, cut loose in time by talk and the fireflies and the subliminal triggers of memory. It seemed to me, as I ran my palms up the warmth of your white t-shirt, that the people in my life weren't beads strung on a wire of sequence, but clustered like quanta. Eventually, I came to feel that this was a situation in which real becomes merely another concept. It doesn't tell the whole story. Remember that. Nothing ever does...
I'd had this unit on the shelf for a while. I'd used earlier versions to jack into the matrix twice, once only recently, and enjoyGhost in the Machine
I'd had this unit on the shelf for a while. I'd used earlier versions to jack into the matrix twice, once only recently, and enjoyed the experience. It was time I did it again.
The first two times, the matrix seemed to be all order and accord. I suppose all the chaos was on the outside. Each time I jacked in, I escaped the chaos and found some serenity inside for a while.
This time, though, something had changed. The Shape had changed. Or something had changed it. Maybe, even, it had changed itself? In cyberspace, there are no shadows. Maybe it had turned around and seen its own shadow. Or its own reflection. Maybe it had freaked, like it had just seen its own ghost?
Whatever, inside, it was like somebody had poked a stick in a hornet's nest. Everybody was running every which way, real people like me who'd jacked in, and data people. I couldn't tell who was chasing and who was being chased. There was some voodoo shit going down.
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Apparently, three-quarters of humanity was jacked in, watching the show. And I have to say, it was some show. I was tempted to stay in there, but I had this sneaking suspicion that I would never get out if I did. It was strangely addictive, like watching a train crash about to happen. Would you avert your eyes? Would you watch or run, if it was coming towards you?
I decided to run. I got out only half an hour ago. I'm safe, at least I think I am. It's a bit hard to tell. I haven't seen anybody else yet. They're probably all still jacked in. They could be trapped inside forever with all the other data. Ghosts in the machine.
On the other hand, I just realised, what if I'm the one who's still inside and everybody else has escaped? How could I tell that this is outside, if there's nobody else here?
Maybe it's me who's turned into a ghost. Maybe I'm the ghost in the matrix, the ghost in the machine. What am I going to do? Wait? Pretend it's life as usual? Read another book? Write another review? Wait for somebody to turn up and like it?
What if they liked it from the inside? Would it still count? What if Cracker never read one of my reviews again? What if nobody ever liked one of my reviews again? Worse still, what if they were still inside reading them, but didn't like them? What a bummer!
As punishment for a business indiscretion, Case, who lives for the "bodily exultation of cyberspace" (oTo Call Up a Demon, You Must Learn Its Name
As punishment for a business indiscretion, Case, who lives for the "bodily exultation of cyberspace" (one of many neologisms first used in "Neuromancer"), is injected with a wartime Russian mycotoxin and hallucinates for 30 hours, only to suffer damage that is "minute, subtle and utterly effective".
He falls into a "prison of his own flesh". After some fringe medical treatment in Siberia reinvents him, he emerges debt-ridden and physically compromised, a secondary character in his own fiction, an ex-cowboy relegated to support for the uber-competent, sub-Amazonian cyber-warrior, Molly, in a mission dictated by the savior of his health.
The world he returns to is a composite of analogue real life and a digital information-rich matrix. His surroundings are "a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties...totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market..."
The experience of cyberspace is "a consensual hallucination...a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data."
For all of the social applications that would eventuate on the internet, Gibson focusses on business and the market (especially the black market). Where there is knowledge, there are insiders. And therefore, crime.
Still, everywhere, Case sees a sensorium of "symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information..."
The language is as fractal as it is alliterative: "It flowed, flowered for him, [a] fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity."
Molly is a fellow professional, a razorgirl, someone Case gets to share these sensations with, and perhaps even sometimes to experience a "mutual grunt of unity".
The novel is basically an action story in which the two use a firmware construct and a Chinese virus program to penetrate deep into the matrix on a secret, but illicit, mission to correct the "Gothic folly" of the Villa Straylight (a manifestation of the multi-national zaibatsu or corporate business entity, Tessier-Ashpool), their accomplices, quasi-terrorist, dub-loving Rastafarian Panther Moderns.
The folly, a demon which at first has no name, turns out to be a dialectical conflict between two segments of cyberspace, Wintermute and the Neuromancer.
Like Apollo and Dionysius, each is unknowingly necessary to the survival of the other, but can they be synthesised, can they be united, can they become one, can they eventually go by one name? And what of Case and Miss Linda Lee, or Case and Molly?
These are questions best answered by the pleasure of reading this pivotal work of cyberfiction.
The prose style is economical, but filmic. It’s a tragedy that this novel hasn’t yet been made into a big-budget film that does justice to its imaginative scope. For the moment, at least, the book must remain the sole source of the reader's bodily exultation of cyberspace.
NEUROMANTIC HAIKU:
The Whole Thing
Wintermute can’t change The world outside without a Personality.
Molly
I never found out The colour that her eyes were. She never showed me.
On the Beach (with Miss Linda Lee)
He saw three figures On the edge of the data, Waving at himself.
Shuriken
He touched the nine points Of the star, one at a time, His chrome shuriken.
INTERMISSION:
Larry McCaffery:"There are so many references to rock music and television in your work that it sometimes seems your writing is as much influenced by MTV as by literature. What impact have other media had on your sensibility?"
William Gibson:"Probably more than fiction. The trouble with "influence" questions is that they're usually framed to encourage you to talk about your writing as if you grew up in a world circumscribed by books. I've been influenced by Lou Reed, for instance, as much as I've been by any "fiction" writer. I was going to use a quote from an old Velvet Underground song- "Watch out for worlds behind you" (from "Sunday Morning") - as an epigraph for Neuromancer."
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