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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780399154300
ISBN number: 0399154302
Label: Putnam Adult
Manufacturer: Putnam Adult
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: August 07, 2007
Publishing house: Putnam Adult
Sale Popularity Level: 11320
Studio: Putnam Adult
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
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 yesterday 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 endeavor 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.'
Product Description:
Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.
Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.
Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.
Bobby Chombo is a 'producer,' and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishing houses Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post 'rave.'
Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), 'One of the very first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century.'
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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The only reason I gave two stars instead of one is that I like the fact that Gibson injects some meta-criticism of his older thinking (in particular the reason why virtual reality isn't what it used to be). But as far as a "literary thriller," this book doesn't fly. There was never a point where I was feeling anything. The characters were completely passive and flat, the plot listless, without any interesting twists or turns, and just a smattering of media theory (the best part). None of the characters were believable or made sense. Their motivations were mostly inexplicable.
It's ironic that Stockholm Syndrome is mentioned more than once considering that a) most of the characters were captives to their fate and destiny, and b) like story's various hostages, I as a reader felt captive by a droll narrative because I am hugely sympathetic to Gibson's mind and his books. I particularly loved his last book, Pattern Recognition, so I'm a little disappointed by the follow-up (yes this is a sequel in the vague way that the Sprawl trilogy connected through through peripheral characters).
Rated by buyers 
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Spook Country
William Gibson
Penguin/Viking
William Gibson is justifiably renowned as one of the key founders of the now vast realm of cyberpunk. His 1986 novel Neuromancer was a foundation stone for a new style of futuristic fiction; high tech but gritty. The opening line of the novel said it all: "The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel."
In Gibson's world voodoo met with artificial intelligence. It was a dark realm of worrisome virtual realities. It was a soaring burst of imagination that, at the time, had no equivalent.
Since that time Gibson has gradually been re-inventing himself, coming closer to the present day with each book. His latest, Spook Country, is very much placed in the here and now, resonant with references to 9/11, the Iraq war and corruption within the current American administration. At heart it is a thriller, without the flourishes of remarkable futurism that marked Gibson's earlier works and as such it will be a disappointment to those hoping for the surreal leaps of vision in his earlier works. But Spook Country remains resolutely a Gibson book, replete with references to the gods and goddesses of voodoo belief. Here the iPod meets the goddess Ochun and a drug called RIZE clashes with the muscular, athletic god Oshosi.
The promotional blurb for Spook Country claims that the novel is "J.G. Ballard meets John Le Carré", but the novel is far too American for it to fit into such a bizarre English context. One suspects that the Canadian-born Gibson is more influenced by the paranoiac sci-fi of Philip K. Dick and the stylistic tropes of Raymond Chandler, both denizens of Los Angeles where much of the novel is set.
Sense of place is a major aspect of Spook Country. Elements of LA and New York City are captured brilliantly. As one of the key protagonists, the youthful Cuban exile Tito, sprints through Canal Street in New York one can envisage the setting immediately. But although this is New York post-9/11 - a fact that is central to the story - Gibson fails to capture the sense of displacement many New Yorkers still feel, a sensation rendered palpable in Don DeLillo's latest novel, Falling Man.
Like DeLillo, Gibson uses an artist as one of his triggers to get the action rolling, in this case an artist who uses a kind of virtual reality recreation of past events such as the death of River Pheonix. The artwork is the ostensible subject of a feature story for a not-yet existent magazine called Node to be written by a former indie-rock singer Hollis Henry. It quickly becomes apparent that Node will probably never exist and its' supposed publisher is seeking something else entirely. Running parallel to this story are the mysterious goings on of a group of Cubans, especially the athletic Tito who summons the aid of Ochun and Oshosi when necessary, a CIA-type thug and a drug addled character called Milgrim.
Central to the book is the `producer' Bobby Chombo, a paranoid and reclusive troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment who refuses to sleep in the same place twice. Hollis Henry has been told by her editor to find him but not told why.
With his sprawling matrix of characters the narrative moves along at break-neck pace. Mis-information transfer run by the Cubans - often via i-Pod - constantly misleads shadow-agents of the government. Also central is the fortune of American cash set aside to help re-build Iraq that has been pirated away for other, unspecified, but clearly corrupt, uses.
At times Gibson's narrative soars, at others it is dogged down by slightly lame character development. It is ideal Winter reading but fails to claim anything like the cultural potency of Neuromancer.
Rated by buyers -
Continuing in the near-future world of Bigend and Blue Ant, "Spook Country" mixes complex twists and turns, multiple threads and rich character studies. This book takes longer than "Pattern Recognition" to set-up, but the payoff is well worth the effort.
[That's all I'll say in comparison, as comparison reviews fill me with inertia, and imho are almost useless]
Gibson possesses the magical ability to transport readers, and this book did that to me once again. More, more, more please.
Rated by buyers 
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A sequel to "Pattern Recognition" and a more than worthy successor. I can hardly wait for the third book of Gibson's latest trilogy!
Rated by buyers -
Spook Country
If you haven't read William Gibson before this is the not what I recommend you start with. I don't think its his best work to date.
I think Pattern Recognition is one of his best, most accesable books set in the current period so far.
I do appreciate his attemps to put his vision and writing style on current day events. And even though I didn't enjoy this book as thoroughly as some of this others, I'll still keep reading anything he puts out because of his captivating writing style and point of view I just don't get anywhere else.
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