http://futuretrilogy.wordpress.com/20... ( )

http://www.fnordinc.com/2009/11-12/bo...

Spook Country, a book where absolutely nothing happens, in detail.

after 100 pages, i was still lost as to the point of this book. every character is dangerously interesting. nothing is cohesive, just chapter after chapter of loosely tied together story. just enough to keep you turning the pages, but not enough for you to know what is happening.

there is no “main protagonist” or “main antagonist” every character has their own agenda and none are good or evil. everyone has something going on and you are slowly led through the various stories until they all merge into one semi-cohesive semi-plot. every one of these characters deserves their own book.

dont hold your breath for a big bang ending though. when it all culminates in the last 25 pages, you will either be giggling at the cleverness or unhappy that you sat through it all.

i think this book would make a great film modified and directed by the cohen brothers.

thats it. no more review. as the books semi-plot doesnt have much to it besides build up, i would hate to give up anything specific.

i do really want to listen to the band “the curfew”, though they do not exist, i was left curious about their sound and influence.

- fnordinc.com ( )

Ouch. I love Gibson's work, which was the only thing that kept me reading this interminable and unengaging story. Better luck next time. ( )

I will freely admit that part of my problem with this book probably stems from the fact that I read about 5 chapters a day over a prolonged period of time. It made an already chunky plot more confusing.

I think the idea of locative art is both interesting and a little horrifying. Our visual space is already so cluttered I can't even imagine what it would be like with locative art, not to mention the ways the same technology would be used for advertising (which is the truly horrifying part).

My real problem is that I really am not a fan of the story telling style where there are two or more separate groups of characters who have their own story lines who only come together at the end of the book. That kind of storytelling often feels fractured to me and when there are so many different points of view all of the characters end up feeling very superficial to me. It's a form of story telling that almost never works for me. If I like one of the characters I resent having to read about the rest and in the very rare case where I like all the characters it takes a while to get into each section and just when I get comfortable I have to switch POV again. This was a case of feeling like I never really connected with any of the characters and what could have been a really cool story if it had focused on just Tito, just Bobby, or just the guy trying to track them down just wasn't. ( )

I really enjoyed reading this book. Gibson does a fine job of weaving a story with multiple sub-plots which eventually merge. His understanding of Internet culture, and the society that it spawns, makes this book an even better read for those with the context of said culture. I would have given it five stars, but I still like his last book, Pattern Recognition, slightly more. I felt like the characters in Pattern Recognition stood out a bit more. ( )

This might be a good book, but the writing style left me so cold I didn't get more than a chapter into it. ( )

(This here's my first LibraryThing book review. Apologies the for rambling tone.)

“Secrets,” says Hubertius Bigend, the mysterious Belgian financier in William Gibson’s Spook Country, “are the very root of cool.” And cool is the very root of this novel. Hollis Henry may be a down-on-her-luck journalist today, but once she sang in cult-fave band The Curfew, and so goes around wrapped in a fading halo of cool. Tito is a young and smartly-dressed member of a Cuban-Chinese crime family, trained in KGB espionage tactics and devoted to a pantheon of Caribbean voodoo gods. These things are definitely cool. Milgrim is a bit of a nebbish, but he’s also addicted to fancy pharmaceuticals, and so possesses all the sordid cool of the veteran user.

All of our characters are cool, sure – but they are also, in their ways, all captives. Hollis finds herself forced to be a pawn in the Great Game shenanigans of her secret-collecting employer Bigend. Milgrim is dependant for his drugs on the meathead G-man known only as Brown. (Brown needs the junkie’s (never accounted for) knowledge of Volapuk, an obsolete Cyrillic-Roman creole script invented by the Soviets for use on Western computer keyboards: Tito and family text each other in Volapuk.) Tito himself is periodically “ridden” by his spirit guardians.

If Spook Country has an argument, it may be that we are all captives in our ways, possessed by cool. Like the fan Hollis encounters early in the novel, we make “otaku eyes” at celebrities and commodities, fascinated by the “secret history” they seem to reveal and conceal, hieroglyph-style. Learn enough about the cool things, and you might escape from the dullness and oblivion of mundane, official, “public history.” This fascination with cool is only the more common form of the desire for secrets generally; and that desire, Gibson seems to say, is a kind of slavery, literally enthralling. It’s a variation on Stockholm syndrome, capable of deforming a human soul. It’s probably no accident that the two least cool characters in this book, Bigend and Brown, are also the ones most greedy of secrets.

Gibson the artist may be trying to make some such point, but Gibson the geek sometimes resists it. Spook Country is an ambivalent book: the characters may have their misgivings, but their author clearly relishes his arcana. The novel is stuffed with governmental acronyms (PANDA, DARPA, ICE, CONUS) gee-whiz vocabulary words (darknets, wardriving, breakbulk, steganography, freerunning, BASE jumping, and, of course, Volapuk) and brand-name dropping (shoes are never just shoes: they’re always Adidas GSG9 boots).

Gibson is a fine writer, though, and out of his storehouse of “wonk-hipster” knowledge he spins a multitude of splendid images and observations. He can occasionally be very funny too. There’s a bit of expository dialogue carried out between sock puppets; and the Milgrim/Brown relationship develops into a sort of toxic, hateful Laurel and Hardy routine.

In the end, Spook Country never quite transcends it’s techno-thriller conventions. Yet it’s still an enjoyable and sometimes thought-provoking novel; indeed, clear away some of the cloak-and-dagger stuff, and you’re left with a pretty good “way-we-live-now” snapshot. This is the first Gibson production I’ve read, and from what I gather it’s not typical of his work as a whole. Spook Country may be a near miss, but it’s close enough to a hit that I’m eager, now, to see what Gibson can do when he’s on his A game. There’s an old paperback copy of Nueromancer that’s been in my to-read pile for awhile – I plan to start on that sooner rather than later. ( )

I still adore Gibson's voice, his use of language and dialogue, his take on culture and technology. They hooked me in the so-called Sprawl trilogy, and though there are frequent references in reviews (LT or elsewhere) to his "working backward" from a science-fiction future to a barely-ahead-of-us contemporary setting, I think he's simply working through whatever vision he had originally. And I like it.

"Spook Country" is notable for its integration of music (not on-your-sleeve like Iain Banks, perhaps), and continues Gibson's interest in information as power / currency. Technology is inevitably involved. He also continues his use of name brands (designer wear, customised gear such as aftermarket car offerings, and marketing boutiques being most emblematic) as a means of looking at aesthetics, in the sense of "truth" or "beauty" as much as about style or fashion.

All that said, "Spook Country" reads fast. I almost welcome the interruptions in reading as they afford me an opportunity to reflect on what I've read rather than simply process it sufficiently to pursue the plot to the end. The plot's not the thing, here, it's merely a frame on which to hang the various ideas. But it's easy to forget that, and I write that with admiration.

Conceit: found three distinct usages of the concept of "spook" in the first three chapters, and thought I might be onto something. I can see Gibson making an exercise of fitting variations on the theme into each chapter. At around chapter 19, I must admit I was forcing it a bit. Thereafter I decided to "find" one only if compelling, and several subsequent chapters had quite striking examples. So maybe it's more than just my conceit, Gibson may actually have made a game of it. Given his books read like screenplays (loads of dialogue and very short chapters), with little space for a digression in some of the briefer examples, it would be suitable to skip the exercise for those chapters in which it would simply intrude. Regardless of authorial intent, it was fun to seek them out.

About the ending: I disagree with others who seemed disappointed or wrote that everything wrapped up too neatly. The actual "secret" (what's in the container, who's after it, and why) actually is sensible, and the letdown is more a function of secrets in general (and human psychology) than anything here, in my view. As for all the characters wrapping up their individual quests / issues / concerns: sure, maybe a bit neat, but if it had been angst-ridden or elsewise unhappy, I'd say that would have been a bit overwrought on Gibson's part. I say again, I don't think the plot's the thing here, it's a scaffold, and in that sense I like it being spare & neat.

Finally: Gibson never uses the term 'intermodal' which seems strange given that it's what he's discussing, and he certainly tends to research and deploy precise terminologies, so the omission is glaring. Unless I missed it, he only used the terms 'shipping container' or 'box'. Interesting. ( )

Gibson has a rare style with words: tightly packed. He structures a sentence to be minimal but as you read the sentence his images/ideas expand like an airbag in a car crash. His characters are often artists; I like to steal their ideas.
"She put the helment on, turned it on, and looked up, to where Alberto's giant cartoon rendition of the Mongolian Death Worm, its tail wound through the various windows of Bigend's pyraminidal aerie like an eel through the skull of a cow, waved imperially, tall and scarlet, in the night." p 317.

William Gibson is favorite of mine. I named my cat, Spooky, to honor my long love affair with Mr. Gibson's writing. ( )

Wow, William Gibson rocks! I wish I could write like him.So 50 pages in it suddenly hits me, Pattern Recognition was Neuromancer rewritten in current times, and Spook Country is Count Zero. Cool! This means there must be a third book coming that is an analog of Mona Lisa Overdrive. I hope it doesn't take him 4 years to write it.I don't know why this wasn't more apparent when I was reading Pattern Recognition. I guess it's been awhile now since I read Neuromancer and Count Zero and I don't remember everything that happened or all the characters. But Cayce's name being the same as Case should have been a huge clue. In fact it took me until I realized that Bobby's name was also Bobby to fully cement the connection for me. And then I started seeing all these patterns...I wonder why Gibson chose to tell the same basic story twice only from slightly different perspectives and in a different reality. Like the laws of physics, these are the laws of Gibson?I really liked Tito, I think he's my favorite Gibson character so far. I'll be really upset if Brown comes back and kills him in the next book. That better not happen. ( )

This was my first William Gibson novel. It certainly won't be my last. Well-developed characters, good dialog, evocative urban scenes, an interesting plot, a very satisfying wrapping up of threads at the end. It appealed to my geeky side as well as my wannabe hipster side. It really is a brilliant novel. ( )

I felt like I was completely missing something in this book, almost as if I wasn't intelligent enough for it. I read it rapidly as to get it over with. I just didn't identify at all, which is very disappointing considering all of the rave reviews. ( )

Stylish and classy, clearly a master's labours. ( )

Fascinating story. It takes you all sorts of different places and slowly draws everything almost together. Well paced. ( )

“an old-fashioned cat-and-mouse caper involving much technology and Acronyms..scurvy government agents and many WannaBes...you have a pathetic junkie Russian-speaking hostage, held by the mysterious MR Brown...a beautiful Cuban-Chinese lad capable of turning backflips in midair whilst being pursued..a paranoid cybergeek whose talents are in demand by the locative Art set..and Hollis Henry former rock singer now journalist under contract to a magazine that doesn't exist..oh and a shipping crate containing $100 billion - adrift in seas of all sorts..Mr Gibson is treading in LeCarre country here..the plot is a bit preposterous, but only a bit. The Best way to prevent Money Laundering??? any one...” ( )

Fun, kept me interested, but definitely nothing special. You probably should read this if you are expecting anything like cyberpunk. This could rightly be called a techno-thriller, but in reality it is pretty much just a plain old mystery. Not great, not bad.

I have kind of a hard time caring much about the characters. Also, I get kind of irritated that in a way, it seems as though Gibson is specifically trying to write a book that will get made into a movie. In fact, this would be probably have been better in that medium. ( )

I was really looking forward to this book. I enjoy William Gibson’s writing and snap up each book as it is published. Part way through, I was really looking forward to being done with this book. Nope. Didn’t work. Didn’t care. Nice ideas, some semi-interesting people, but nothing to compel me to finish this book (other than the fact that I resolutely refuse to not finish books – and Ulysses doesn’t count – I will be back some day.)

It was tough getting into the story. It was not that the disjointedness was off-putting – I am perfectly fine with that approach. It was the fact that I never felt drawn into the characters or the story. And then it was tough to just sustain the momentum to keep reading. The only interest I could marshal was in the exploration of virtual art forms. But the intrigue didn’t intrigue me. And, when it was all said and done, the final caper left me with the feeling that a lot of effort went into very little result. Towards the end, one character wonders if the entire thing is not just an extremely involved prank. The reader leaves feeling the same way. ( )

I thouroughly enjoyed William Gibson's latest offering, Spook Country, in this movement, like Pattern Recognition, away from what we traditionally think of as "cyberpunk". This novel combines the detailed workings of a generational ex-KGB crime family with a paranoid, typically solitary "geek" searching the complex data streams of international commerce, as seen through the eyes of a journalist with pop-culture roots as a former punk band front girl. Gibson weaves these stories together in a very meticulous way, but not to the degree where the "coincidences" of the three lines coming together are so perfect that it takes you out of the story as unbelievable or riduculous. I think that many authors today could learn from his style, and cool down on the number of mathmatically impossible chances of their storylines so perfectly slamming into each other, that seems to grace the pages of lesser masters of the art of fiction.

The subject matter is one previously untouched by Gibson, creating a whole new landscape in "present time". The characters are all in search of a special cargo container, and the intelligence and counter-intelligence surrounding its location. The description of the smallest crime family in the world, and their detailed system of operation is fascinating. No move is made unplanned or in reaction to their emotions, even those that are seemingly random to those watching have been carefully orchestrated to invoke this non-pattern appearance.

The theme that draws our rock band front girl into the mix is not far fetched with today's current technology, the idea of geo-locational artwork. I, as many, already geolocate my photos on vacation with simple tools and small gps devices. With google earth I can see where my pictures were taken on the map, with the pictures displayed, it seems a logical next step to incorporate that into any of the wearable computer displays available and display the photos at the GPS coordinates when you are there in person. I really like the extent that Gibson developed this idea and the "scene" he created around it for the novel.

The anti-climatic ending of Spook Country is perfect. It definately will make you think; your own ponderings instantly fill the vacuum created by the outcome. There is no better way to finish this story, and it would have been ruined by spectacular action at the finish. The action-packed lead up to the relative calm and place for reflection is as enjoyable a journey as the serene, thoughtful, destination. ( )

I loved Pattern Recognition, but Spook Country went over my head. I didn't quite understand what was going on or why. I think the book may have been smarter than me.

I basically just loved Milgrim and wanted more of him. ( )

William Gibson seems to be writing the history of cyberspace in a non-linear fashion, where the chronology of his writing is the opposite of his timeline. His early works, from the era of Count Zero and Neuromancer, are definitely in the foreseeable but still distant future. With Pattern Recognition, the release prior to Spook Country, Gibson moves to the future of maybe a few months from now. In Spook Country, we are given enough clues to place this book’s context after Pattern Recognition, but still in a very real, very near future. I can only wonder if our world is changing to conform to Gibson’s vision of the future or if he is trying to make his works more contemporary.

Gibson visits some themes of previous books and some characters from Pattern Recognition help bind this book to Gibson’s idea of future history. Hubertus Bigend, the mystery man behind the mysterious corporate entity known as Blue Ant, are the first landmarks we recognize in this new work. The video at the core of Pattern Recognition is plainly identified as happening prior to this story unfolding, so we are able to get a temporal fix for this story as well. We go beyond his last present and are introduced to a new art form, locative art, reminiscent of the sunglasses so essential to Virtual Light. Locative art is a type of virtual reality that is only visible at specific geographic coordinates. If you are wearing the proper virtual reality helmet and you know the coordinates, you can travel around to different places and see incredible artistic creations. As I said, this is just over the event horizon of our now. It is a very likely combination of art, GPS technology and computer technology that becomes the foundation of the cyberspace depicted in Neuromancer. As in Count Zero, Gibson introduces the Lords of the world of Voudon as protectors of some of the players in this book.

In addition to the aforementioned Hubertus Bigend, the cast of characters includes some classic Gibson archetypes. Our heroine, Hollis Henry, is a former singer in a band and is now trying to become a writer. She is from the same mould as Cayce Pollard from Pattern Recognition. Tito, a Cuban-Chinese “facilitator” is linked to the Orishas of Voudon, as were several characters in Count Zero. Chambo, the technical connection for the locative artists, will probably see Case, from several Gibson adventures, as one of his descendants.

While all this sameness may seem boring, William Gibson’s writing makes these essentials come alive in a new way through a unique story. Hollis Henry, originally accepting an assignment from Bigend to do a piece on locative art, finds herself in the middle of a high tech espionage plot to sabotage a money laundering operation. The tension and interaction of the characters is on par with Neuromancer, arguably Gibson’s top work to date. It seems that as the author steps away from the fancy sci-fi world he began creating for us, he is learning to really hone his writing skills. Rather than using the smoke and mirrors of cyberspace to distract us, he is dazzling us with some brilliant writing technique. Originally I lamented the loss of Gibson’s rough edges, but now I am beginning to really appreciate his writing and storytelling skills.

While I believe the story of Hollis Henry and most of the cast in Spook Country is done, there is enough of an air of mystery about Hubertus Bigend and Blue Ant, I would not be surprised to see them as part of another offering from this author. In the last two stories, these entities played important roles, but they still remained in the background. I think their story has yet to be revealed and I, for one, am looking forward to hearing it. ( )

A shimmering shekhina of techno-chic shrouds a fairly routine techno-thriller. ( )

William Gibson looms large over the scifi scene, yet his latest, Spook Country, is not so much “scifi” as “modern mystery”. He tells the story of techno-whiz artists experimenting with GPS, virtual reality, and locative artworks. He also tells the story of the world’s smallest criminal family and the world’s most secretive advertising agency.

Unfortunately, all of this sounds much better in summary than it comes off in execution. For the most part, Spook Country reads like a lightweight airplane novel. At times, some overwrought turn of phrase or painfully convenient introduction of high technology made me cringe as a reader. Gibson is overly fond of pop-cultural references (the very minor plot element of steganographically encrypted iPods is a good example).

But whenever I’d find myself, as a reader, getting too hard on Gibson, I’d pull back and realize that I had to give credit where credit is due: Not enough writers attempt the whole tech-art heist/government conspiracy plotlines. So from that point of view, Gibson is a smashing success. And it is very refreshing to read a relatively hard-boiled story using such artsy-fartsy fodder. It fits with the wannabe-bad-boy attitude of much avant-garde digital art, too.

In all, Spook Country is not a bad read. But it is certainly not a great read. It is what it is, and that’s a pretty kick-ass novel as far as art world heist stories go. ( )

This is the book with which Gibson has finally, definitively fallen behind the curve. Some of his previous books have been bad -- Idoru, anyone? -- and in general, he's been writing the same book over and over, with the same stock characters. But this is the first one in which he no longer seems to understand the zeitgeist.

His stock characters are all social marginals. The Finder of Art -- not an artist, but someone with a mystical ability to track it down. The Rogue Corporate Boss. The Streetwise Muscle. The Tapped-In Insider Exiled. All of them make an appearance in this book, more or less. But the book isn't about social marginality. It's about the evil done by the Bush administration to America. And Gibson has no way of confronting that -- comically, futilely, he has a junkie ventriloquize a lecture, but patently can't go anywhere from there.

No one in the book is really a government employee, working on government time. So Gibson can't confront the fact that the post-9/11 social problems that he depicts have a cause, because he doesn't do governments, he doesn't do personalities. But he can't even really depict what's gone wrong as a structure. Even when he was writing about corporations, he never could bring himself to write an actual one -- they were always rogue individuals, caricatures with more or less unknowable motives, but really nothing like how an actual, impersonal corporate structure operates.

That was fine, back in the days when everyone was dislocated and everyone imagined a face that they could hate. He caught something of that time. But now that there is an actual face -- now that the agenda involves people becoming all too located -- he's lost track. ( )

Smart, tight, great characters. Ending seems a little lightweight for all the heavy paranoia of the first 2/3. Still, a good read. ( )

This might be a good book, but the writing style left me so cold I didn't get more than a chapter into it. ( )