William Gibson is one of my favorite visionary authors, I love his style and concepts----and every other book he's written! This book , however, never really gets off of the ground,and just dances around with itself in search of both plot tension and a satisfying conclusion. i was going to give it one star, but he has enough of his city descriptions to make it barely tolerable. Gibson really fails on this one-i wouldn't waste my time....pains me to say that. All of his other stories have an actual payoff, this one just goes round and round.

A "puppet" (in this novel a virtual personality constucted in software) yearns to be a real boy (in this novel... a real girl!).

This fine book is the culmination of couple of pseudo-episodic Gibson novels...his writing gets better and better and some of the passages are almost impossibly beautiful in their spare conciseness and wonderful language/syntax. Highly recommended for reading out-loud to (or by) your partner.

Gibson skillfully weaves the theory of historical inflection points (or cusps) into a story about how an artifical intelligence/personality (who apparently yearns to be free) manipulates various characters and the public nano-compiler network in order to become embodied as a young woman!

If you didn't catch that your first time through, read it again!

Told almost entirely from the meats' point of view and populated with hints of themes to come in Gibson's following (and very highly recommended) book, Pattern Recognition. Also, for relevant background, read the previous novel: Idoru.

The unpoliced ghetto encrusting the ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge is the surreal setting for ex-cop Rydell and his girl friend Chevette as they maneuver to regain control of the Idoru -- an artificially-generated Japanese media goddess of irresistible beauty and intelligence. Hidden away like a djinn inside a portable memory unit, the Idoru now lies at the cusp of a technological tsunami that will forever alter human civilization. Rydell is being directed by a tortured master computer-hacker Colin Laney, now dying of pneumonia and malnutrition in a cardboard box in the bottom of a Japanese subway -- one of the few humans with the rare gift -- or curse -- of being able to recognize the true patterns that exist behind the shimmering data flood from cyberspace. Gibson's tense writing is pressurized with ideas, phrases and images that make his novels unforgettable -- and sometimes barely comprehensible. A continuation of Gibson's last novel "Idoru," this action-packed book holds out the promise of more to come, and reinforces my conviction that Gibson is an extraordinarily powerful and visionary writer -- even though I never exactly figured out the plot. If you like this brain-twisting vision of technology's effect on civilization from the man who invented the word "cyberspace" don't miss another amazing book he co-authored with Bruce Sterling -- "The Difference Engine."

--Auralgo

I normally don't write reviews for books, but I had to for this one because it is so bad, as many others have said. I too am a Gibson fan. But I want the time spent reading this book back, I feel it was so wasted.

I almost put the book down, but instead I foolishly hoped Gibson would somehow tie all the scattered, half hearted events together in the end. As many have said, you never find out what this "nodal point" is. The payoff NEVER comes.

You don't get close to really any of the characters. You want to get close to Rydell, but there is not enough of him there. There is WAY too much jumping around.

And there is way too much of "look at what a clever writer I am" by writing incomprehensible "creative" prose.

I don't know why some writers - even great writers- fail to grasp the most important point about writing: It's the STORY stupid.

This book is a chain of events that are disconnected, unfinished and unsatisfying. Read some of his earlier works, sure, but don't pick up this painted mess, regardless of what the so-called reviews on the cover say.

In "All Tomorrow's Parties", one of the characters, Berry Rydell, is given a cool gadget: a phone/sunglasses combo that also uses GPS to map out locations through the lenses. A few years ago, I thought, "Cool!". Now, (2006) they have sunglasses with a Bluetooth headset conveniently built on. Geeky, but, SF and real life continue to reach out and touch each other.
Gibson has his protagonist, Colin Laney, from "Idoru", living in a cardboard box in Tokyo. Convinced that a great pivotal moment in history is about to happen, Laney communicates with Berry Rydell, via rented disposable cell-phone (surely available in Japan?). Laney, a victim of some nefarious experiment which causes him to be obsessed with a man who more or less owns the world. Why? Because the mysterious man, and Rei Toi, the human-like software agent and Rydell and everyone living on the San Francisco Bridge are to be participants in a world-changing event. And only Colin Laney, who has some sort of ability, as a result of the experiment done on him, can sense all these elements coming together.

I think Gibson, inadvertently, had presaged an event akin to the 9/11 attacks, which certainly has altered the world. Most people read Gibson's books, I think, for the tech stuff, maybe trying to see, through Gibson's eyes, what's coming. But, Gibson's writing was always interesting in a poetic way. The man has a poet struggling inside the prose-writer, trying to get out.

Gibson has recently complained that it's getting more difficult to imagine the future in a SF kind of way, because the present is getting more like the technology in SF books lately. I tend to agree. And you just gotta love those cool GPS/phone/sunglasses.