Laney the Obsessed

In All Tomorrow’s Parties written by William Gibson, Colin Laney’s character is very suspenseful and difficult to comprehend, especially at the beginning of the story. It starts with Laney living in darkness, in a cardboard box in Tokyo city who is sick, never leaves the box unless he needs to empty his urine bottle, obsessed with Cody Harwood and talks of nodal points and people after him. The foreign, incoherent and disconnected information in the first few chapters made it very confusing to read. When I started the book, particularly the first chapter about Laney, all I thought was: what? who is he, what is he talking about, why is he living in a cardboard box?


However, as the novel proceeds and the plot unfolds, I realized a pattern: each chapter is devoted to and narrates one character. After recognizing how the novel is structured, it makes reading less difficult and much more easier to understand the various characters in the story. Laney’s character becomes more comprenhensible, interesting and very unique; nevertheless, there are times where he is still puzzling, for instance this is shown in chapter 8, "The Hole". "The Hole is that which Laney's being is constructed around ... into which he has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information" (40). I still don't quite understand what "the Hole" represents. Perhaps it is his mind? A place where he stores everything, including his life, his beloved and his emotions? Any thoughts and comments on this?

Laney was an orphanage in Gainesville, and infected with the syndrome 5-SB that made him become a psychic, gave him the gift to perceive and identify patterns or “nodal points” within enormous tracts of media information. He is able to feel changes that occurs in the world, and can form predictions, such as the world is going to end soon and it’s going to happen at San Francisco. This makes him special for he has the capability to “progress through all the data in the world (or the data’s progress through him)” (163). This ability has become “what he is, rather than what he does” (163). It makes him obsessive with data flows, and leads him to becoming obsessed with Harwood, who we find out near the end, is just very much like Laney. (Harwood has taken the 5-SB and has the same talent as Laney.)

On the side note: What strikes me the most is that Colin Laney reminds me of the movie Johnny Mnemonic starring Keanu Reeves, and surprisingly the movie is based and inspired by the short story “Johnny Mnemonic” which is written by Gibson. Likewise, Johnny Mnemonic has a cyberpunk plot. It is set in a futuristic time, consisting of hackers, artificial intelligence and large corporations just like “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. I find it interesting that Laney shares some similar abilities with Johnny. Although the two stories have completely different plots, the parallel ideas and characters helped me relate and understand Laney better!

By: Rosalie Pham