The book has three separate but overlapping stories, with the repeated appearance of shared characters. The San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge, the overarching setting of the trilogy, functions as a shared location of their convergence and resolution. The first story features former cop Berry Rydell, the protagonist of Virtual Light. Rydell quits a temporary job as a security guard at the Lucky Dragon convenience store to run errands for atrophied computer hacker Colin Laney, who lives in a cardboard box in a subway in Shinjuku, Tokyo. As a child, Laney was the subject of pharmaceutical trials which damaged his nervous system. As a result, he suffers from a form of attention deficit disorder but gains the ability to discern nodal points in the undifferentiated flow of information, and from that he acquires a certain predictive faculty. This makes him ideal for the role of "netrunner" or data analyst. A side effect of 5-SB, the drug administered to Laney, causes the user to become attached to strong personalities. As a result, Laney has become obsessed with media baron Cody Harwood of Harwood/Levine, a powerful public relations firm. He spends his life surfing the net from his enclave in the subway, searching for traces of Harwood in the media. From this, Laney foresees a crucial historical shift which may precede the end of the world "as we know it". He predicts that Harwood, who had also taken 5-SB before, knows this and will try to shape this historical shift to his liking. To stop Harwood, Laney hires Rydell under the guise of a courier to travel to San Francisco where he believes the next nodal point will congeal. The second story concerns ex-bicycle messenger Chevette Washington, also from Virtual Light, who is on the run from her ex-boyfriend. She escapes to her former home, San Francisco's bridge community, to find refuge and revisit her past. She is accompanied by Tessa, an Australian media sciences student who visits the bridge to film a documentary on "interstitial communities". The third story follows a mysterious, left-handed mercenary named Konrad. Although Konrad is employed by Harwood, he appears to be directed by his own motives. In particular, Konrad aligns his movements with the Tao, the spontaneous, universal energy path of Taoist philosophy.
Characters
Colin Laney – Data analyst with an ability to sense nodal points.
Chevette Washington – an ex-bike messenger who lived on the Bridge for several years and is on the run from an abusive boyfriend.
Berry Rydell – A rent-a-cop and former lover of Chevette who is working as a security guard at a convenience store Lucky Dragon in Los Angeles.
Shinya Yamazaki – Self-described "student of existential sociology".
The Suit – an impoverished ex-salaryman who lives in the Tokyo subway and repaints his suit daily instead of purchasing a fresh one.
Konrad – Taoist assassin hired by Harwood.
Tessa – Chevette's media student roommate, who drives Chevette to the Bridge in her van in order to make a documentary on its inhabitants.
Boomzilla – A street impresario with designs on Tessa's balloon camera.
Silencio – A savant boy with an extreme fascination with watches and the talent to find them no matter the circumstances.
Fontaine – A Bridge resident and pawn-shop owner who takes Silencio into his care.
Rei Toei – A holographic idol.
Buell Creedmore - An alcoholic/drug addicted country singer with a short temper and a knack for being in the wrong place at the right time. Although he tries to pass himself off as a native Southerner, he later reveals he was born and raised in New Jersey.
Major themes
Major recurring Gibsonian themes which feature heavily in All Tomorrow's Parties are the sociological impact of emergent technology, millennial alienation, the commodification of the counterculture, the existence of nodal points in history, and the notion of the interstitial. Despite the novel's oblique reference to Madame Curie, Gibson has stated that his placement of the last major nodal point in 1911 was a "viewpoint joke," unconnected to factual events in that year. He had heard a story that Virginia Woolf "pinned the beginning of the modern era on a particular weekend in 1911." The author's long-time fascination with Japanese culture continues in this novel.
Literary significance and reception
The novel was critically well-received, with particular note given to Gibson's vivid, well-realised setting and dense prose, though reviewers found its ending to be anti-climactic. Sci Fi Weekly reviewer Curt Wohleber praised the "precision and economy" of All Tomorrow's Parties in comparison to its sometimes dull predecessors. Gibson scholar Tatiana Rapatzikou located the novel's significance in the fact that it had several motifs, themes and characters in common with Virtual Light and Idoru "without being sequential". In the words of The Guardian journalist Steven Poole, the novel completed Gibson's development "from science-fiction hotshot to wry sociologist of the near future".
