“The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” ( Time ) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from  Idoru ... Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco.   The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible... “ All Tomorrow's Parties is immensely engaging, alive on every page and as enjoyable a weekend entertainment as one could want.”— The Washington Post Book World   “Gibson, one of science fiction's greatest literary stylists, is at his best [when] he offers visceral detail even when promising transcendent change—a moment in the near future when the fabric of daily life will twist profoundly.”— Wired  “Moves at warp speed...[Gibson] is a witty and compelling storyteller.”— Los Angeles Times   “[A] hard-edged and grimly beautiful piece of work.”— Chicago Tribune   “Gibson has done it again.”— Time Out New York “A creepily plausible near-future of nanotechnology and virtual-reality pop idols, delineated in Gibson’s customary diamond-sharp prose as the plot hurtles toward existential apocalypse.”— Elle “Ultra-cool cyberpunk...this familiar, vigorous, vividly realized scenario is set forth in the author’s unique and astonishingly textured prose.”— Kirkus Reviews “Gibson’s rich protopointillism coins a wireless future where reality is only proxy and proviso. Made all the more beautiful and frightening by its probability, and by characters who somehow tweeze hope from the polymer.”—Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files William Gibson ’s first novel,  Neuromancer , won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. He is the  New York Times  bestselling author of  Count Zero ,  Burning Chrome ,  Mona Lisa Overdrive ,  Virtual Light ,  Idoru ,  All Tomorrow’s Parties ,  Pattern Recognition ,  Spook Country ,  Zero History ,  Distrust That Particular Flavor , and  The Peripheral . He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife. All Tomorrow's Parties By William Gibson Ace Books Copyright ©2000 William Gibson All right reserved. ISBN: 9780441007554 Chapter One CARDBOARD CITY THROUGH this evening's tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amidhurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a singleorganism into the station's airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, hisnotebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest butmoderately successful marine species.     Evolved to cope with jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shoppingbags, ruthless briefcases, Yamazaki and his small burden of informationgo down into the neon depths. Toward this tributary of relative quiet, atiled corridor connecting parallel escalators.     Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceilingpocked with dust-furred ventilators, smoke detectors, speakers. Behindthe columns, against the far wall, derelict shipping cartons huddle in aragged train, improvised shelters constructed by the city's homeless.Yamazaki halts, and in that moment all the oceanic clatter of commutingfeet washes in, no longer held back by his sense of mission, and hedeeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere.     He winces, violently, as a fashionable young matron, featuresswathed in Chanel micropore, rolls over his toes with an expensivethree-wheeled stroller. Blurting a convulsive apology, Yamazaki glimpsesthe infant passenger through flexible curtains of some pink-tinted plastic,the glow of a video display winking as its mother trundles determinedlyaway.     Yamazaki sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters.He wonders briefly what the passing commuters will think, to see himenter the carton fifth from the left. It is scarcely the height of his chest,longer than the others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap of thumb-smudgedwhite corrugate serving as its door.     Perhaps they will not see him, he thinks. Just as he himself hasnever seen anyone enter or exit one of these tidy hovels. It is as thoughtheir inhabitants are rendered invisible in the transaction that allowssuch structures to exist in the co