One of the satisfying paradoxes about William Gibson is that the writer who hardwired the circuitboard and silicon world to prose as elegant and precise as an algorithm actually dislikes the Internet.
To fully savour this, you must understand that Gibson not only is credited with inventing a gritty, technohip form of science fiction called "cyberpunk", but with envisioning (and coining the word) "cyberspace" - a surreal, dataflow world very like the Web. Except this was very pre-Web, in the 1984 novel Neuromancer.
Cyberspace, he wrote then, is "a consensual hallucination . . . A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity . . . ".
Thus did he give us all cyberhomes to go to when the Web emerged in the early 1990s. Yet he avoids the medium and lacked even an email address until recently, and finds the Internet a disappointment. "Gradually I found there wasn't really anywhere in particular I wanted to go," he wrote in January for Wired magazine - except the online auction site eBay, where, he says, he trawls for vintage watches.
And vintage watches play a significant part in his latest novel, All Tomorrow's Parties, the final book in the trilogy that includes Virtual Light and Idoru. That has been appropriate, since Gibson has always been interested in the detritus of time, the technological and political leftovers of one era (namely, the 20th century) and how they wash up in unexpected mutations somewhere in the first half of the next.
All Tomorrow's Parties (the title is from the poignant, eponymous Velvet Underground song) dips again into Gibson's bleak, media-saturated future and brings back excop Rydell, ex-bike messenger Chevette, the computer-generated Japanese starlet Rei Toei, and ex-security guard Laney, the man strung out, heroin-like, on data. The plot hinges around Laney's ability to enter virtual reality and "see" nodal points of history - the strange attractors around which events in the real and cyberspace world begin to accrete, spurring moments of significant global change. Thus all our characters find themselves in San Francisco, waiting to see how the cusp-like moment will unfold and what role each will play. All Tomorrow's Parties is a mixed bag, combining some of the weaknesses of Virtual Light and the (considerable) strengths of Idoru, probably Gibson's best work since Neuromancer. Chevette and Rydell, from Virtual Light, were always far less compelling than Laney, from Idoru; and Virtual Light's guys-and-guns storyline is less intriguing than Idoru's tight, virtual intricacies. But here, as always, the minor characters are finely etched, as are the distinct, perfectly nuanced personalities of cities themselves, and the blurred, white, Asian, black and hispanic ethnic stew of the future.
Although Idoru remains the trilogy's star, All Tomorrow's Parties is a welcome addition, if a little too dependent on its predecessors for context. And Gibson, the literary lord of the digerati, is so effortlessly good that even this lower-calibre effort comes across with magnum-force, compared to most of the competition.
Karlin Lillington is an Irish Times journalist
