By: William Gibson Publisher: Berkley Trade Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Berkley Trade Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 384 Publication Date: June 03, 2008
Product Description: The New York Times bestseller from “one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present.”( Washington Post Book World)
Hollis Henry is a journalist on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo is a producer working on cutting-edge art installations. In his day job, Bobby is a trouble-shooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one.
Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
Amazon.com: Now that the present has caught up with William Gibson's vision of the future, which made him the most influential science fiction writer of the past quarter century, he has started writing about a time--our time--in which everyday life feels like science fiction. With his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, the challenge of writing about the present-day world drove him to create perhaps his best novel yet, and in Spook Country he remains at the top of his game. It's a stripped-down thriller that reads like the best DeLillo (or the best Gibson), with the lives of a half-dozen evocative characters connected by a tightly converging plot and by the general senses of unease and wonder in our networked, post-9/11 time.
Across the Border to Spook Country
For the last few decades, William Gibson, who grew up in Virginia and elsewhere in the United States, has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, just across the border from Amazon.com's Seattle headquarters, which made for a short drive for a lunchtime interview before the release of Spook Country. We met just a few miles from where the storylines of the new novel, in a rare scene set in Gibson's own city, converge. You can read the full transcript of the interview, in which we discussed, among other things, writing in the age of Google, visiting the Second Life virtual world, the possibilities of science fiction in an age of rapid change, and his original proposal for Spook Country, which we have available for viewing on our site. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:
Amazon.com: Could you start by telling us a little bit about the scenario of the new book?
William Gibson: It's a book in which shadowy and mysterious characters are using New York's smallest crime family, a sort of boutique operation of smugglers and so-called illegal facilitators, to get something into North America. And you have to hang around to the end of the book to find out what they're doing. So I guess it's a caper novel in that regard.
Amazon.com: The line on your last book, Pattern Recognition was that the present had caught up with William Gibson's future. So many of the things you imagined have come true that in a way it seems like we're all living in science fiction now. Is that the way you felt when you came to write that book, that the real world had caught up with your ideas?
Gibson: Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond that. And I think over the course of these last two books--I don't think I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s--as strange as it may seem to say this--we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.
Amazon.com: Now that you're writing about the present, do you consider yourself a science fiction writer these days? Because the marketplace still does.
Gibson: I never really believed in the separation. But science fiction is definitely where I'm from. Science fiction is my native literary culture. It's what I started reading, and I think the thing that actually makes me a bit different than some of the science fiction writers I've met who are my own age is that I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs in the same week. And I started reading Beat poets a year later, and got that in the mix. That really changed the direction. But it seems like such an old-fashioned way of looking at things. And it's better not to be pinned down. It's a matter of where you're allowed to park. If you can park in the science fiction bookstore, that's good. If you can park in the other bookstore, that's really good. If people come and buy it at Amazon, that's really good.
I'm sure I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails. But that just the way it is. All of that stuff reads so differently now. I think nothing dates more quickly than science fiction. Nothing dates more quickly than an imaginary future. It's acquiring a patina of quaintness even before you've got it in the envelope to send to the publisher.
Amazon.com: So do you think that's your own career path, that you're less interested in imagining a future, or do you think that the world is changing?
Gibson: I think it's actually both. Until fairly recently, I had assumed that it was me, me being drawn to use this toolkit I'd acquired when I was a teenager, and using my old SF toolkit in some kind of attempt at naturalism, 21st-century naturalistic fiction. But over the last five to six years it's started to seem to me that there's something else going on as well, that maybe we're in what the characters in my novel Idoru call a "nodal point," or a series of them. We're in a place where things could just go anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross's argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It's not going to happen. We're not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it's so convincing. I read that and I'm like, "My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child."
Brilliant, but not perfect The good: This book has some brilliant characters which ultimately intertwine around a caper based climax at the end. The writing is clever and a joy to read, and paints a very realistic and plausible world, once you get past the first chapter, which was like another reviewer mentioned like wading through overly descriptive mud. The reason it isn't perfect was that I felt the climax, which had been building nicely, didn't come to as much resolution as I would have liked. Of course there is enough material to do some sort of sequel, but that is up to Mr. Gibson. All in all, worth the read, but not his best work.
The Future is Now and Gibson is still there! The "follow the bouncing Character" is always enjoyable for me. Gibson links it so well that I can read a chapter or 3 late at night and enjoy every minute of reading and the anticipation of the next chapter!Interesting people, nice yarn; Gibson always come through for me!
Not anticipating the next one I'm not sure I'll be rushing out to buy the next novel from Gibson if this book is an indication of where his writing is going. I thought Pattern Recognition was a brilliant story, but Spook Country was just flat. I had no feeling whatsoever about the characters, and although the prose was as deliberate as ever, I didn't feel that the trip made the goal bearable. There was so much potential here that just seemed skipped over. Ultimately disappointing. Like reading a textbook.
Decent book, but not Gibson's best First off, let me say I'm a huge Gibson fan. I've worn through a couple of copies of the books in the Neuromancer series, enough that I've had to buy new ones, and have read the others not in that series as well. I have, thus far, enjoyed everything he's written on one level or another.
Spook Country, while good, was not his best work by a long shot.
In other books, I feel that cyberpunk "edge," be it in the characters, in the technology or topics discussed, etc. In this one, the technology aspect revolves around GPS and "locative art." Locative art was a new concept to me, just as some of the other concepts were new to me when I read the other books, but with the others, I came out caring and interested - with this one, I didn't care about locative art. It just didn't add anything or bring that edge with it that I expected.
The characters in the book were decent, though I felt like maybe there were too many, or the ones that were there didn't have enough depth. The main character I cared about, but the others I just didn't. Some were intriguing and I wanted to know more, but it just wasn't delivered.
The plot was reminiscent of something from a Robert Ludlum novel, but without the page-turning action. There were spies, people with no names doing dead-drops of information for other folks to pick up, and tailing people, but you didn't get the action that it felt like the plot warranted.
The three key things that bugged me:
1) Gibson's writing style has changed such that, you'll see, he writes in very long, winding, complex sentences with lots of adjectives and commas, and maybe an odd metaphor thrown in, so that, by the time you reach the end of the sentence, which is really a paragraph in-and-of-itself, you'll have forgotten what he was talking about at the beginning. (Just like that.)
2) By the time the climax comes, you're expecting something really cool to happen, but it doesn't. You work all the way through the book to get to this one particular event, it happens, and... poof. It's done, nothing comes of it, and you don't care. It's like the event never happened at all. (Which, admittedly, is sort of a theme here - it's spies doing things under the radar, so you don't notice. But the climax? Come on, throw me a bone!)
3) In many of his other books, Gibson throws in references to vodou-based religions and gods. Sometimes it's just an aspect of a character, sometimes it has to do directly with the plot, but in all cases it weaves in reasonably well with the story. This time, too, there are vodou references, but they don't make any sense. They stick out there as a distraction, like an afterthought - "Oh, crap, I finished the book but didn't throw any vodou in there!" I kept wondering where it was going, just to find out that it didn't have anything to do with anything.
In the end, I did like the book, but if you haven't read any Gibson before, start with Neuromancer instead.
The pleasure of finding things out "The only constant I am sure of is this exhiliarating rate of change". We're busy acquiring layers: Physical and intangible ones, digital, highly personal and general, all of which combine to our reality. This book reads like a densely, at times beautifully written personal blog (ok - from various POVs). Along for the ride, I found myself constantly googling bits & pieces. I ask you: Which of you had ever heard of 'locative art, the Mongolian death worm, Cuban gods, the secret flagellants of Thuringia' - or even those obscure car brands, before reading this book? What a delight to discover they all do exist (sort of)! Okay - I admit the Ativan-addicted Milgrim character had me stumped until I remembered 'Milgram's 37'. Much has changed since Feynman had no end of trouble finding any info at all on Kyzyl (or how to get there). Now there's all this info, just a mouse-click away. Of course it's endlessly fascinating to look at how we make sense of this. A book we're reading while travelling (or music on our ipod) is now as ever providing additional subtext (like Milgrim's revolutionary messiahs), but these days we have to be interactively travelling online (sleuthing) while at home (reading Gibson) - no other choice really, unless you want to miss out on meaning. Yes, the plot's a little thin (4 stars), but as Gibson touches so many other layers of inspirational and current (political) subtext without actually spelling them out, it's as always an insightful, thought-provoking (and if you do the googling) very rewarding read. Great language too.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tony's Online Tips
Trevor
William Gibson: It's a book in which shadowy and mysterious characters are using New York's smallest crime family, a sort of boutique operation of smugglers and so-called illegal facilitators, to get something into North America. And you have to hang around to the end of the book to find out what they're doing. So I guess it's a caper novel in that regard. 
