All Tomorrow's Parties: The Not-Too-Distant Future?

William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties is about a futuristic world, but one that is really not too far into the future. The new technologies described in it, the dystopic society where capitalism and consumerism have gone to the extreme, and the merging of various cultures into one are all a little foreign to us, yes, but still foreseeable. This makes the novel realistic, for it is not hard to imagine such a world.

There are numerous examples in the novel of the combining of cultures, such as "Dirty is God"(Gibson 67), the restaurant that serves Mexican food while playing Japanese music. This is simply an extension of our current "global village" idea, of bringing the world closer together. The Internet is supposed to do this; it gives us access to news and information from around the world, allows us to chat and communicate with people from distant countries, and serves as a universal database, where anyone with a set-up can access the same things as anyone else.


Ironically, what was meant to bring people closer together has in many ways alienated us further from each other. People spend hours alone in a dark room staring at a computer screen instead of interacting with "real" people. We can send e-mails instead of seeing others in person, or even instead of hearing their voice over the phone. This cold alienation is evident in Gibson's novel, in the dystopic society he depicts. The world he describes seems very detached and cold. It is a world based even more on capitalism, consumerism and technology than our world today, but it is not so far exaggerated that we cannot fathom such a place existing. The Lucky Dragon convenience stores, for example, which are the same worldwide, are only a slight exaggeration of our 7-11's and other globalized companies.

Even the major advancements in nanotechnology in the novel are not inconceivable. In last Monday's Vancouver Sun, the headline on front page article read, "Welcome to the world of nanotechnology." The story is about advancement in the science being made at a new facility in Alberta. "It's reasonable to say it's the next technological revolution," one of the physicists says in the article, adding that it could take as little as ten to forty years. This is not referring to the exact advancements Gibson describes, of course, but the idea of nanotechnology creating major changes, and soon, is evident.


It seems that Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties shows us a highly possible future. His "tomorrow" could come sooner than we think.