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Loading... Spook Countryby William Gibson
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 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. (  )bumpish | Jul 5, 2009 |   This might be a good book, but the writing style left me so cold I didn't get more than a chapter into it. (  )readinggeek451 | Jun 13, 2009 | (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. (  )ngmoore | May 12, 2009 | 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. ( )elenchus | Apr 23, 2009 | 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. (  )lumber | Apr 5, 2009 | 0.069 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0399154302, Hardcover)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?
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." (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:09 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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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. 
