Just finished William Gibson's 1999 novel All Tomorrow's Parties, which turns out to be the third and final installment of his Bridge Trilogy. I had read the second of them (Idoru) a couple of summers ago, then recognized a couple of character names in this one and consulted the old interweb to see what was up. When I see it somewhere on the shelf of a used bookstore I will pick up the first of the three, Virtual Light.
Fortunately -- and as I knew from his first trilogy (Neuromancer -- Count Zero -- Mona Lisa Overdrive) -- the knitting of parts in Gibson is loose. Much indeed is loose overall. Having finished this one, we're not 100% sure what was supposed to have happened in the climax, though it seems to have somehow been ironically disrupted. For the most part it appears that the good guys have won and lived to see the sun more or less rise. Really Gibson is not so much about plot as he is about tone, texture and conjecture. If it all seems rather far-fetched, we need only look back to the good old days of land lines, Walter Cronkite, Sears catalogs and Hee Haw of our collective youths and compare it to where we are now to see that his ability to look forward has merit. And in the end, they are all pretty much buddy books, in which we celebrate the successful exploits of a bunch of misfits.
On the separate topic of reading serieses of books out of order, oh well. I suppose it's better to read them in order but the world doesn't always work out like that. At some later point in my life I may decide, for instance, to go back and read Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries in order to see the characters mature. Or maybe not. Time will tell.
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