My rereading of all of William Gibson's novels has brought me to the end of the Bridge Trilogy. What struck me wasn't (just) how much of its imagined future feels like today's actual present. It was instead how much I felt nostalgic for the parts of its future that don't.
I'll start by saying, I enjoyed All Tomorrow's Parties more than Idoru, but considerably less than Virtual Light. In fact, six novels into this rereading, that first book in the Bridge Trilogy is my favorite. Which is something of a surprise to me, because I'm relatively sure Neuromancer is the novel, by anyone, I've read the most times.
Throat clearing done, what works about All Tomorrow's Parties is we get back the sense of scope, the feel of a world, that Idoru lacked. The Bridge is interesting, the world and sociology around it interesting, and the novel brings back the interesting characters from the first book. Where it falters is the same place Idoru did: While Virtual Light was about protagonists doing something, All Tomorrow's Parties is about things happening to its protagonists. They wander around, uncertain of where they're going. And that uncertainty is bound to, a necessary part of, the plot. The whole novel is structured as "Something big is coming, no one knows what, but people can feel around the edges of it, so they're all kind of walking towards where those felt edges point, and somehow it'll all come together."
It does come together, I'll grant the novel that, but what it is remains a bit opaque, a bit made-up-as-Gibson-was-going-along. The result is a novel where most of its chapters are about people who either feel like they lack agency or about whose goals are entirely opaque to the reader until the very end, when things click together, but don't feel like they, well, hang together. We're told, throughout, that this inflection point will change everything, but the novel ends without having a strong sense of what kinds of changes what we've just seen happen will bring about. What the lasting difference is.
It's weird, because there's a moment, just before the book's end, when it feels like something substantial, world reshaping, has happened, and I got a sense, listening to the audiobook, of that. An emotional swelling. But then the chapter ended, we moved to the next, the last few, and everyone just was back to the smallness of their lives. Not in a derogatory sense. The novel tells me the world has changed, but doesn't give me much sense of what living in that changed world would mean.
I don't need a novel to spell out for me, in its coda, "Here's how everything's different." A novel can end without that. But the whole of All Tomorrow's Parties is about how much things are about to change. Characters keep telling us how much things are about to change. One of the main characters, the one who sets a lot of the story's events in motion, and gives directions to the other characters acting without goals, sits in a cardboard box from the story's beginning to end, plugged into the internet, all because he knows, through drug induced informational insight, that things are about to change.
But the future that fails to arrive inside the novel isn't the one that stayed with me. It's the future that failed to arrive outside it. I remember when I read these novels the last time, as each came out, which was while I was in high school and then college, and being disappointed. Because what I wanted, back then, was the flashy cyberpunk worldbuilding of the Sprawl Trilogy. The Bridge Trilogy, back then, felt more like tinkering around the margins of the real world of the mid- to late-90s. Now, though, coming back to them 27 years after ATP's publication, older and a different person than I was back then (I turned 20 the year ATP came out), I'm less interested in the flashy tech of Neuromancer and much more interested in the shockingly prophetic sociology (and, it turns out, technology) of Virtual Light et al. These books feel, now, awfully close to describing our world, now. Sure, some terms are different, some computer equipment isn't shaped quite the same. But so much of it feels entirely familiar, just distorted a bit. (Except, no spoilers, for some technology that plays a big role in "What's changed," even if the consequences are fuzzy. That tech was popular in imaginations when Gibson was writing, but as Adam Becker persuasively argues, it really can't ever really work.)
Though one difference, and you get this just as much in the Sprawl Trilogy and it's a key way our world turned out less interesting than William Gibson's two worlds, is that technology (computers, phones) in the Bridge Trilogy has a DIY-ness to it. Hardware is something people can buy, and fancy versions from fancy corporations, but it's also something they can assemble, or assemble for boutique sale, and all of it has character.
In the last twenty years, hardware in our world has become dull. All the same. My phone looks like your phone. My OS looks like your OS, and the differences there come more from crappy skins OEMs slap on than that you and I customized things. MacOS is MacOS. Android is Android. iOS is going to behave and look the way Apple likes and you better like it, too. Sure, you can run Linux, but few do. Yes, you can assemble a gaming PC, but, again, few do. This isn't that technically you can't have hardware and software with character. It's that no one's encouraged to do so, and industrial design has largely converged on "What Apple does," and what Apple does has become boring.
You also don't get the excitement of the new rig that maybe you've heard of but never met anyone who owns, but is just so much more powerful, so much more capable, than what consumers have their hands on. Outside of graphics cards or industrial users, consumer tech is like consumer fashion and consumer music: it feels like radical evolution has plateaued. We're in the long 2010s.
Which isn't bad. Tech does progress. Phones can do amazing things. But none of it feels exciting, unless you venture into weird corners of, for example, decentralized protocols, where most people don't go. Put another way, there was a moment, in the 80s and 90s, when it felt like we might become cyberpunk in an exciting and fun sense. But we didn't. We became blandly corporate instead. So what came through, for me, reading the Bridge Trilogy for the first time in a quarter century, was a sense of being haunted by a future that once seemed possible but never arrived. Gibson's books, unintentionally I think, have become hauntological.