Gibson’s Vision of the Future Grows Fuzzy Around the Edges

In William Gibson’s latest 21st century thriller, an earthquake--the Little Big One--has left the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland unfit for traffic. The wind-scoured girders have sprouted an “autonomous zone” of shacks and bars, a postmodern Barbary Coast. A toxic spill has driven the rich from Malibu, and squatters, including film student Chevette Washington, have taken over their beachfront mansions.

But decay, then as now, is mixed with progress, grunge with gloss. At the Los Angeles convenience store where ex-cop Berry Rydell, one of Chevette’s ex-boyfriends, works security, a high-tech exterior coating eats up the graffiti street kids scribble on it. An AIDS-like plague has made the smallest drop of anybody’s blood dangerous to touch, but somebody has invented a spray-on disinfectant, blobs of which mark every crime scene.

Colin Laney, a character from Gibson’s “Virtual Light” and “Idoru,” is on the run, desperately sick and hiding in a cardboard box in a homeless encampment in the bowels of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. Still, technology enables him to “jack into” the oceanic currents of data flowing through cyberspace (a term Gibson is credited with inventing).

Drug experiments performed on him when he was an orphan in Florida have given Laney the unique ability to perceive patterns in this data. He sees a “node of history” approaching in which “everything will change,” as it last did just before World War I. The change will begin in San Francisco, headquarters of Laney’s nemesis, Cody Harwood, a shadowy multi-billionaire who “maybe, just maybe, ran it all.”

This is a constant in fictional visions of the future: Life may get freer, in an entrepreneurial, freelance-hacker kind of way, but it never gets more democratic. Democracy is slow and deliberative; the world of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” moves at warp speed. Harwood senses the coming change too--whatever it may be--and aims to stay at the top of the food chain regardless. To this end, he is willing to kill any number of people. Only Laney has a chance to stop him.

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But Laney needs somebody on the scene. He contacts Rydell, who hurries north. So does Chevette, who is fleeing a much worse boyfriend than Rydell and is seeking sanctuary on the Bay Bridge (the book jacket insists on showing us the Golden Gate), where she grew up.

Also in the mix are a drunken country singer; a mute Latino boy who has seen too much; a kindly, bigamist antiques dealer; a Japanese pop star, Rei Toei (tutored by Laney in “Idoru”), who is pure software and dwells in a Thermos-sized “projector” yet strives to become human; and the most dangerous man in San Francisco, employed by Harwood yet independent of him: a middle-aged Aryan samurai who kills with grace and a Zen-like detachment.

Gibson, who won Hugo and Nebula awards for his first novel, “Neuromancer” (written, according to literary legend, before he even owned a computer), is a witty and compelling storyteller. He’s good at character-drawing and wonderful with details, the surfaces and textures of things--even things nobody has yet seen.

The foreground story in “All Tomorrow’s Parties”--good guy loses girl, fights bad guys, maybe gets girl back--works well enough because Rydell and Chevette are likable, because their world isn’t so different, emotionally, from ours and because the action zips along.

The background story, however--of Laney and Harwood and a virtual “Walled City” of hackers, of Rei Toei’s disappearance from Japan, of multiple realities and paradigm shifts--is like the San Francisco fog: There’s less to it than meets the eye. The ending is peculiarly unsatisfying. Little seems resolved, and what’s left hanging isn’t clear enough to lead us into a sequel, even if Gibson has one in mind.