Rydell quits a temporary job as a security guard at the Lucky Dragon convenience store to run errands for atrophied computer hacker Colin Laney (the protagonist of Idoru), who lives in a cardboard box in a subway in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

[2] As a result, he has a form of attention deficit disorder but gains the ability to discern nodal points in the undifferentiated flow of information, and from that he acquires a certain predictive faculty.

[6][7] Despite the novel's oblique reference to Madame Curie, Gibson has stated that his placement of the last major nodal point in 1911 was a "viewpoint joke," unconnected to factual events in that year.

"[8] (Woolf had actually declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910," which inspired the belief that the modernist literary movement began around that time.)

[11][12][13][14] Sci Fi Weekly reviewer Curt Wohleber praised the "precision and economy" of All Tomorrow's Parties in comparison to its sometimes dull predecessors.

[11][15] Gibson scholar Tatiana Rapatzikou located the novel's significance in the fact that it had several motifs, themes and characters in common with Virtual Light and Idoru "without being sequential".