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Spook Country (Blue Ant #2)

3.58 of 5 stars 3.58 · rating details · 9,541 ratings · 1,107 reviews

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 m...more

Hardcover, 371 pages

Published August 7th 2007 by Putnam Adult (first published 2007)

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Sep 12, 2007 Lee added it

I finished reading William Gibson's newest novel, Spook Country, a few days ago and have been trying to figure out how I feel about it. It is one of the few books I have eagerly scooped up in hardcover, I loved his Pattern Recognition so much. The promise of another book set in what can only be called the "extreme contemporary" moment was too much for me to pass up or wait for paperback to experience.

Unfortunately, Spook Country does not rise to the level of its predecessor. The main problem, in...more I finished reading William Gibson's newest novel, Spook Country, a few days ago and have been trying to figure out how I feel about it. It is one of the few books I have eagerly scooped up in hardcover, I loved his Pattern Recognition so much. The promise of another book set in what can only be called the "extreme contemporary" moment was too much for me to pass up or wait for paperback to experience.

Unfortunately, Spook Country does not rise to the level of its predecessor. The main problem, in my view, is that there is a lack of harmony between its plot and its people. In Pattern Recognition, the quest to find the maker of the footage was intimately tied to the nature and capabilities of the novel's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, and to the existential situation of our moment, which allows for the possibility of anonymous internet authoring. Cayce was, indeed, the right person for the job, perhaps the only person for it, and the footageheads were a genuinely new kind of social arrangement whose newness will quickly fade but whose novelty has been captured via Gibson's trendspotting style.

In contrast, Gibson here gives us a cast of interesting characters whose position in this imagined present has little, in the end, to do with what happens at the level of plot or in terms of their historical moment, its specificity and existential terror. Does Hollis Henry's having sung for The Curfew affect the plot? Only vaguely. Does Tito's being from a Cuban-Chinese boutique crime family really matter? Though the idea is a terrific one, no. And Milgram, what is his ultimate purpose in the narrative? Why his trip to D.C.? Why does so much of the novel take place in transit between places? Or in restaurants, for that matter?

In the end, after 300 pages of passivity, we get little narrative reward for having gotten to know Milgram; he feels like filler, a third plot thread Gibson couldn't figure out what to do with. And don't get me started on my love of but ultimate disappointment in the concept of locative art. Gibson has hit upon a fascinating idea, but he has not taken enough time to develop its implications or tease out the relationship between this new medium and the nature of the contents of the "Flying Dutchman" shipping container. This leaves the last thirty pages of the novel feeling something like a tacked on effort to tie up loose threads (admittedly, the last chapter of Pattern Recognition fails in the same way).

All that said, let's make no mistake: Gibson writes many amazing, observant sentences and the Union Square action sequence is fantastic, the best part of the book, rising to the level of the best he's written. My disappointment stands largely in relation to my extreme admiration for what he accomplished in his previous novel, and for what I see as his power and potential as a writer. If I were going to give Gibson advice (never a good idea), I would say this: take an extra year or two to perfect the next novel in this trilogy, which undoubtedly will concern China, if the ending of this novel is any clue. Novels of this sort should stand as monuments, finely crafted explorations of the unknowable present, standing up to scrutiny from any angle, unimpeachable.(less)

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Aug 18, 2007 (0v0) rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's a little thin. Compulsively readable, nicely plotted, and delightful in its references to places and technologies of the 2006 moment. (In this, I read it under the right conditions: the day it was released, on an LA-NY flight. It opens on the block in which I used to live. I drove past Gray's Papaya in midtown just as his characters had breakfast there.)

But the thing is, the characters just get thinner and thinner. It's intentional, I guess. He's trying to create new archetypes. But it make...more

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Aug 28, 2007 Enrique Ramirez rated it 1 of 5 stars

I was disappointed by this book. William Gibson, touted as a writer with ideas, handles the conceptual with a surprising lack of deftness. In one sense, this book is about name-checking pop culture ephemera and devices. More attention is given to the description of the insoles of Adidas GSG-9 boots and cesium bullets than actual story development. The "chapters" are anything but, and give the novel the feel of a technologically-mediated novela on Univision.

But, more on the object-oriented aspec...more I was disappointed by this book. William Gibson, touted as a writer with ideas, handles the conceptual with a surprising lack of deftness. In one sense, this book is about name-checking pop culture ephemera and devices. More attention is given to the description of the insoles of Adidas GSG-9 boots and cesium bullets than actual story development. The "chapters" are anything but, and give the novel the feel of a technologically-mediated novela on Univision.

But, more on the object-oriented aspects of Spook Country. The emphasis on locative media, visors, bullets, black coats, shoes, et cetera reads as a combination of Bruce Sterling, John Seabrook, and Naomi Klein. Gibson's objects act as part of a post-capitalist dingpolitik (to borrow Bruno Latour's term). One would expect a anti-neo-liberal spin: the media übermogul should be the bad guy, but is the unseen hand that manipulates the narrative's aprocryphal puppet strings. But once Hubertus Bigend's ideas and work is sanctioned, the narrative loses teeth. Once gets the sense of "Bigend is behind all of it ... ho hum."

The novel is also touted as an example of Gibson's new take on science fiction, a variation on the shibboleth that truth is stranger than fiction. Stranger indeed, but many of the ideas that Gibson presents have historical, artistic, and literary antecedents. These antecedents seem to deal with such ideas in more interesting ways than Gibson's. For example, the idea of Latourian dingpolitik reaches a chilling denouement in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Locative media find much more satisfying results in the work of Shimon Attie or Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Some of the "cooler" gadgets have also seen previous lives in the narratives of sci-fi classics. Take, for instance, Garreth's and Tito's gun. The use of a specially design gun with vaporized (or pneumatic) projectiles is a nod to Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. Again, more instances of "Been there, done that."

But perhaps the most serious flaws in the book are the general lack of interest it generates in some of its more important concepts. The narrative's own fascination with locative media becomes undeveloped and uninteresting in the end. A potentially interesting art form is rendered meaningless and fleeting in Gibson's narrative. In addition to creating some wholly unbelievable characters (read: Sarah Ferguson, who seems to know about Chombo mathematical software), Gibson always seems to lobotomize some of the best aspects of his stories. In Pattern Recognition, for example, two of the book's most poignant moments are treated off-handedly.

The total unbelievability of Spook Country runs counter to many reviews of the book. Such verbage claims that the book is an example of how "scary" the contemporary world is, et cetera. If this is the case, and it is, then how is Gibson positioning himself to illuminate this idea? My guess is that he isn't(less)

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Nov 01, 2007 Matt rated it 2 of 5 stars

I've been reading William Gibson for a few years now, well after "The Movement" came and went and the world adopted and forgot the term "cyberspace." I wish I had been around to feel the freshness of that way of visualizing data, but it's a sad fact that I'm young enough to simply take that for granted. Possibly, kids who grew up around Cape Canaveral have the same take on Heinlein.

At any rate, "Spook Country" isn't a novel of the near-future, but the here-and-now, and, honestly, it's everything...more

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Sep 03, 2007 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: sci-fi fans and conspiracy theorists

No matter when or where it is set, all the best science fiction is really about the present day. William Gibson takes this idea to its logical conclusion and writes about the present day as if it were science fiction.

Gibson seems mostly concerned with how our (real) technologies are transforming us. His main character, Hollis Henry (love the strong female characters that are always present in Gibson's work), the lead singer of a defunct band from the '90s, who is now trying to make it as a journ...more

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Jul 05, 2012 Melissa Proffitt rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, sort-of-sci-fi, literary-fiction

This book didn't age very well; the premise (that artists use GPS data to create virtual works of art only visible with the right technology) now seems unlikely and a little weird, given that the actual result of publically-available GPS tracking has been geocaching and comforting female voices directing you to your destination. I didn't care for the overarching conspiracy plot, which felt subordinated to the individual "quests" of the three POV characters, even though those storylines all fed i...more

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Mar 21, 2009 Ron rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: scifi

Gibson weaves another dark mystery from the narrow viewpoints of exotic, solitary characters, as they move through a complex "day after tomorrow" alternate present. We follow an ex-Cuban "spy family", shuttling secrets from buyer to seller on iPods, and an ex-rocker now journalist covering a software engineer working with "locative artists". These artists build 3D visual simulations that appear overlaid in a particular place when viewed through Gibson's beloved VR helmet. All of this leads to a...more

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Jun 26, 2008 Ezra rated it 3 of 5 stars

i found this book to be one of mr. gibson's more frustrating productions. that's ok. i've been a fan, of some sort, for a while; i read neuromancer at just the stage of early adolescence when it was probaby most effective; with each of his subsequent books i've been able to generally ignore the parts where he overindulges in flowery sociophilosophising, or when the plot feels like it's treading water; i'm also consistently sent home with some unfamiliar image or area of inquiry that stays with m...more

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Jul 25, 2008 Jen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Although this was generally an interesting read, for me it had some fundamental problems. 1) For the first 50 pages I found myself daydreaming and constantly having to reread bits 2) The contemporary technology in this book is going to soon date itself. I don't know if Gibson considers this scifi, but the issues at hand (and the technology) already feel a little dated. Though as a result, I suppose it may appeal to a wider audience than other scifi or technical mysteries. 3) It was truly anticli...more

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Jun 04, 2008 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

William Gibson is one of the few writers that I make it a point to be in the store on release day of a new novel. I first inhaled 'Spook Country' over a two day period. I was initially disappointed, for reasons I cannot quite put my finger on. The best I could come up with was that it wasn't quite 'Gibsony' enough for me.

However, having just reread it in a more methodical manner, I have to reverse my initial opinion and declare my love for this book.

The usual, interesting cast of characters is...more

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Mar 02, 2008 Stan Heller rated it 5 of 5 stars

William Gibson's latest work looks at our current world as a science fiction environment. His attention to detail, to marketing and to the latest hight tech toys manages to give his work the veneer of somewhere else while placing it firmly in the present. A neat trick.

Spook Country starts out with an introduction to locative art. Using GPS and viewing glasses, the artist creates phantom art that can only be seen with the glasses. ( Ironically, I worked on a similar project a few years ago and wa...more

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Oct 25, 2007 Daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who liked "Pattern Recognition"

I'd like to think that all but the most blindly jingoistic citizens are at least a little uncomfortable with the government taking so much liberty with our, uh, liberties these days. The war on terror makes a great campaign tool I guess, but with it comes the ugly stepsisters of, among other things, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and private security contractors. And this is what "Spook Country" is about.

Gibson is great at taking cultural developments and following them throu...more I'd like to think that all but the most blindly jingoistic citizens are at least a little uncomfortable with the government taking so much liberty with our, uh, liberties these days. The war on terror makes a great campaign tool I guess, but with it comes the ugly stepsisters of, among other things, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and private security contractors. And this is what "Spook Country" is about.

Gibson is great at taking cultural developments and following them through to gigantic, plausible conclusions. Not only that, but he does it in a way that makes for good reading. In 1984, 23 years ago, his book "Neuromancer" arguably predicted and influenced the development of the internet. For heaven's sake, he invented the word "cyberspace". The man has a fantastic imagination.

"Spook Country" does the same sort of thing, starting from the general vibe created by the politics of the war on terror. Gibson builds a very plausible picture of the intelligence community in which the government's own (real and documented) lax attitude towards the law leads to a situation in which quasi-legal intelligence contractors (c.f. Blackwater) run ragged over civil liberties and the country isn't at all safer for it.

The plot revolves around an errant shipping container that various shady people are very interested in. The container is a sort of focal point that brings the three main characters together. There's:

(1) Milgrim, addicted to anti-anxiety pills and pressed into service by a not-so-intelligent intelligence operative of questionable legitimacy and legality; (Milgrim is, I think, a pretty hilarious allegory for the American electorate. )

(2) Hollis Henry, a journalist hired by a ludicrously rich entrepreneur to investigate the container; and

(3) Tito, a member of a large Cuban-Chinese family that, during the Cold War, developed itself into a boutique intelligence contractor and that are currently contracted to do some container-related syping.

Hollis Henry is a dead ringer for Cayce Pollard from "Pattern Recognition", and in fact "Spook Country" is fairly similar in tone and plot to that book. Not quite a sequel, but not at all separate either. It even features Hubertus Bigend in a reprise of his role as creepy rich dude. Really I only see this pseudo-sequel thing being a problem if you didn't like "Pattern Recognition". Otherwise it's just a good opportunity to hear more of Gibson's ideas about our current society, and I think Gibson's ideas are worth hearing.

Here's a quote that I think is fairly representative of the point of the book:

"A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon it isn’t a nation. … Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?"

Overall, I'd say it was very worthwhile. I smiled while I was finishing the book. It was interesting, clever, and well worth reading. (less)

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Oct 20, 2007 Mark Bukovec rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Gibson fans

I don't know that I have much to say about this. I enjoyed it on a sentence level almost exclusively. I didn't think it was an interesting story, and it came off as a watered-down version of Pattern Recognition.

There's no way to know this, but I have this weird suspicion Gibson struggled writing this book. There's no strong idea behind it. The chapters (all very short) have a self-enclosed feel. Oddly, they all have chapter titles, which you don't see much these days. I'd get to the end of one a...more

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Aug 25, 2007 Christian Haines rated it 4 of 5 stars

Gibson's novel (and its predecessor, Pattern Recognition) constitutes a sci-fi novel set in the present. It manages to create a visceral feel of the future as something pressing upon the present. This feel is notably contained within a dialectic between secret and public histories (as the novel puts it). The future appears to belong to avant-garde artists, cutting-edge corporations, and, as the title indicates, intelligence networks. The plot in this novel is nothing too intricate, especially gi...more

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Aug 31, 2007 Pwntalive rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Pattern Recognition fans, no one else

Every author should only write one great book. all others should be burned. and i will be the arbiter of what single work is that authors most outstanding work. Otherwise, authors who introduce a new genera should be made to never write in that style again, as their contributions to society via the introduction of a genera far outweigh their ability to pile prose together in anything other then episodic poppycock.

at some point in the recent past, gibson decided that the life of the slightly ecce...more

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Aug 13, 2007 Fred Ramsey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Someone who hadn't read William Gibson before.

Well, I finished it. It was good, but overall I have to say that Mr. Gibson has fallen into a rut. I have but one suggestion for him: go out on a limb. Try going forward again. Take all your strengths and apply it to something a little more bold, perhaps attempt to truly look forward 20 to 50 years, or go way out and write a good space opera.

But enough with the John Grisham. Please.

* * *

Still in progress. William Gibson is my Rowling. I will drop whatever I am doing to read a new book by him.

How...more

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Aug 13, 2007 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: cyberpunk fans, hipsters, spy fiction fans

The story consists of the interwoven plot arcs of 3 different Characters: Hollis Henry a retired indie rocker turned journalist, Tito a mysterious boy in a family of Cuban organized criminals specializing in smuggling and forgery, and Milgrim a Russian translator addicted to designer anti anxiety drugs who is being held captive by a government agent. This book is set in the same contemporary world as Pattern Recognition and shares some of the characters.

I really liked this book a lot. Neuromanc ...more

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Dec 30, 2008 John rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this book, though the ability to suspend disbelief required increasing levels of will as the the story progressed and more details were revealed. Early in the book your brain works hard to discern patterns and analyze clues, but this turns out to be wasted effort, given the highly implausible ending. Gibson has an excellent eye for detail, and a real talent for dialog, and the book is a fun read.

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Jan 09, 2009 Carol rated it 5 of 5 stars

Spook country is set in the Northwest, William Gibson's home territory. It is about spies and stealing artistic content. It has some of the same characters that appeared in his previous book, Pattern Recognition. It is a fun and entertaining read.

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Jan 16, 2012 Jeff rated it 3 of 5 stars

I fell for Pattern Recognition like a shmo dating out of his league. It was so much cooler than I was, and my doorway into that cooler world. I had to run to keep up with the first 50 pages, but I loved being out of breath.

Did I mature? Or was Spook Country just less hot? I suppose I should develop some cogency about that question, but I'm too stunned for that yet. The book is good. Whatever kind of semi-science-fiction this is (I can't imagine the publishing world hasn't already devised some Ca...more

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Jun 12, 2008 Brian rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: gibson fans

I could not seem to finish this book; it took me over six months of picking it up and putting it back down for long stretches. The tidbits of wry, Gibson wit and insight are present, but evenly spaced throughout the book; instead of constant, they're consistent. I don't have much sympathy for any of the characters, save Brown and Milgrim, because they're stand-ins for the American populace, both the misguided and outdated conservatives, and the willingly self-medicated and self-victimizing liber...more

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Mar 27, 2010 DoctorM rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourites, hip-noir

The world caught up with Wm. Gibson's sci-fi stories a few years ago in his brilliant "Pattern Recognition". Gibson's world is now this world--- our world. "Pattern Recognition" was in many ways Gibson's 9/11 novel. "Spook Country" is his post-Iraq spy novel, with a few characters overlapping from "Pattern Recognition". Again--- intricate plot, deadpan humour, perfect film-noir pacing, product placement for Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millennium", a spot-on grasp of pop culture and media, a strong an...more

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Mar 31, 2009 Kevin added it

William Gibson has moved over his career from cutting edge science fiction just past the predictable future, gradually moving backwards in his settings towards the present. His last book, Pattern Recognition, felt like it was just barely into the future, maybe taking place the day after tomorrow. He has completed this trip with Spook Country, placing it distinctly in the here and now. There are all sorts of statements to make about what this means for science fiction as a genre, for mainstream f...more

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Mar 12, 2009 Stephanie rated it 2 of 5 stars

In his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, Wiliam Gibson created a dystopic future that popularised the term cyberspace and inspired The Matrix. In his latest novel, Gibson again cooks up a brew of science fiction, this time in a more familiar era -- now.

Like his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, the canvas is the globalised 21st century, and as the title sugests, it is haunted by spooks -- people who lurk on the periphery, from spies to simulacra.

You don't read Gibson for his prose, which tends towar...more In his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, Wiliam Gibson created a dystopic future that popularised the term cyberspace and inspired The Matrix. In his latest novel, Gibson again cooks up a brew of science fiction, this time in a more familiar era -- now.

Like his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, the canvas is the globalised 21st century, and as the title sugests, it is haunted by spooks -- people who lurk on the periphery, from spies to simulacra.

You don't read Gibson for his prose, which tends towards run-of-the-mill pulp, the kind that uses movie stars and brand names as descriptive short cuts. But get past this, and you find yourself in a complex, seething world filled with quirky characters and mind-blowing concepts.

Thrown headlong into the melee is Hollis Henry, the former guitarist with a cult rock band turned intrepid journalist. She has been tasked with covering the "locative art" scene by a mysterious European magazine (that may or may not exist), owned by Hubertus Bigend, the powerful advertising mogul of Pattern Recognition.

In "locative art", artists create virtual sculptures that can only be seen while wearing special headgear, putting cyberspace in actual space and blurring the line between fiction and reality.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, a teenager named Tito from a Cuban-Chinese counterfeiting family is given a series of mysterious missions that basically allows Gibson to write a thriller set in the underbelly of New York City.

Watching him covertly is Brown, an American spy of indeterminate loyalties, and his reluctant (that is, captive) translator Milgrim, a junkie tasked with translating Volapuk, the text-language used by the Russian-speaking family.

These three threads converge over the plot's McGuffin, a large, travelling crate of mysterious origin and contents which all parties are interested in for their own reasons.

What these reasons are, frankly, is irrelevant to the enjoyment of the plot. Instead, let yourself be caught up in the heady otherworld Gibson weaves, where the boundaries between the real and the virtual are routinely crossed.

Or those between life and death, for that matter -- one of the locative art artists, Alberto, specialises in the depictions of dead celebrities, from F. Scott Fitzgerald having a heart attack to River Phoenix collapsed outside the Viper Room.

As the artist says to Hollis, who herself has some idea of the ghost-like nature of celebrity: "The celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under the right circumstances, indefintely survive the death of its subject. That's what every Elvis sighting is about, literally."

Spook Country reminds us that we are living on the edge. Even as we impatiently look to the future to surprise us, he shows us that that world is already here and all around us -- we're just not looking at it the right way.(less)

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" and foresaw the future of the Internet in his 1984 debut, Neuromancer. He once again explores nascent technologies and their impact on society in Spook Country, in which he confronts politics, mass media, and pop culture. Critics who praised Spook Country, a sequel of sorts to Pattern Recognition (2003), saw it as a chilling snapshot of a world gone mad, while those who expected a more conventional thriller were disappointed. Several panned the plot's

...more

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Jan 15, 2009 Kalyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the first book I've read by William Gibson, but I will be sure to read some of his others. The book weaves together the lives of 3 major characters (and several minor ones) in a converging series of vignettes posing as chapters. The viewpoint skips around among them, in roughly real time (so you know how each of them see an event) until the end of the book when the deed is done and they all go their separate ways.

I liked the way it was written and enjoyed trying to figure out how all th...more

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Dec 22, 2008 Artie rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a fun little read as far as sci-fi goes. I would say the characters, while having some depth and dimension were never written in a way that attached me to them. Not even the main character, Hollis Henry. Also, there was a bit of a let down in terms of the mysterious man employing her, binding her to secrecy over some potentially illicit activity and then at the end he seems to just lose his once-intense curiosity without justification. Nevertheless, the story is written from three diffe...more

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Nov 20, 2008 JBradford rated it 3 of 5 stars

Science fiction has never been the same since Gibson wrote Neuromancer, and this one is just as scary in its extension of current trends into a more or less present that is maybe just a few years in the future. Gibson gives me a headache in a way (this book does, too; J.P. Putnum’s Sons selected a terribly thin font that tests my $17 drugstore reading glasses to their limit and beyond), because I keep twisting my mind trying to figure out what is reality and what is projection. This story featur...more Science fiction has never been the same since Gibson wrote Neuromancer, and this one is just as scary in its extension of current trends into a more or less present that is maybe just a few years in the future. Gibson gives me a headache in a way (this book does, too; J.P. Putnum’s Sons selected a terribly thin font that tests my $17 drugstore reading glasses to their limit and beyond), because I keep twisting my mind trying to figure out what is reality and what is projection. This story features one Hollis Henry, who used to be the singer in a defunct band called The Curfew, and it troubles me that everyone in the book seems to remember her on sight—including Tito, a Cuban-Chinese illegal immigrant whose family appears to be a miniscule Mafia in New York City, who follows a strange religion as he works for “the old man” with whom his father used to work; Bobby Chombo, who is a geek genius happily guiding the technology that lets advanced artists create GPS-tagged artwork in cyberspace (where no one can see them, except when wearing appropriate helmets), and who makes fake data messages to be placed in the iPods that Tito delivers to the old man about the location of a mysterious blue shipping container that some real Fed agents once found on a ship while working with pirates as a cover; Garreth, a BASE jumper who has been hired by the od man because of his special skills; and even Milgrim, a Valium-besotted prisoner of a non-Federal agent reporting to someone with a lot of available funds in Washington, because he has a rare ability to translate Volapuk, written communications used by Tito’s family, consisting of English letters and numbers as standins for the Cyrillic characters they resemble; as well as Bigend, a multi-millionaire who has hired Hollis to work as a reporter for Node, a nonexistent magazine. There are many other characters of interest, too, including the surviving members of the Curfew and the novel tracks how these people interface and come together, first in a city park and then in Vancouver (which just happens to be where Gibson has been living since his draft-evasion days). The real question is: who is spooking who?
(less)

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May 07, 2013 Bjorn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Way back before music went digital, John Prine wrote this:
We are living in the future, tell you how I know:
I read it in the paper - Fifteen years ago

When William Gibson starts using the word "cyberspace" as a plot point, you sit up and take notice. And when he starts talking about virtual reality, dont' start shaking your head. Yeah, that stuff with the plastic helmets and the boxy graphics has seemed like a very old and useless party trick since back in the 90s. But what Gibson is aiming for he...more Way back before music went digital, John Prine wrote this:
We are living in the future, tell you how I know:
I read it in the paper - Fifteen years ago

When William Gibson starts using the word "cyberspace" as a plot point, you sit up and take notice. And when he starts talking about virtual reality, dont' start shaking your head. Yeah, that stuff with the plastic helmets and the boxy graphics has seemed like a very old and useless party trick since back in the 90s. But what Gibson is aiming for here is not so much a virtual reality novel as a post-VR novel - in the same sense that "post-modern" doesn't mean "non-modern" or "post-9/11" doesn't mean "we've forgotten 9/11". It's about what happens when something has become so embedded in reality that it IS reality; it's, funnily enough, a novel about borders. Or perhaps, the absence of them.

"See-bare-espace," Odile pronounced, gnomically, "it is everting."
"'Everything'? What is?"
"See-bare-espace," Odile confimed, "everts." She made a gesture with her hands that reminded Hollis, in some dimly unsettling way, of the crocheted model uterus her Family Life Education teacher had used as an instructional aid.
"Turns itself inside out," offered Alberto, by way of clarification. "'Cyberspace'."

Spook Country takes place in a world where cyberspace has indeed everted, become just another aspect of the world; just as the world has shrunk to the place where geographical borders, however well-guarded, can be easily crossed if you know how (after all, what is an illegal immigrant but a real-life hacker penetrating a system with lots of black ICE?). Any reality which involves GPS locators, WiFi networks everywhere, and entire lives being carried in little memory sticks is to some extent virtual. Reality is tagged like a wiki; street artists in Gibson's now don't use spray cans, they use laptops and 3D renderings that only make sense to those in the know to make their mark on the world. The characters, as well-drawn and as human as they are, to some extent come off as avatars – each with their own title, picture and online persona in a world that's always online.

The phrase "trusted networks" briefly made her feel like crying. She wasn't feeling as though she had any.

Now, this obviously addresses some timely issues - and surprisingly enough, by the last 100 pages as the plot becomes clearer, I'm reminded very strongly of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. I'm not in any way suggesting that Gibson ripped Pynchon off, just that they do seem to have tapped into some of the same concerns. The informal secret-by-default societies and underground movements, the fractured narrative, the promise of a brave new world around the corner, the "resistance"... it's all vintage Pynchon themes, but Gibson being Gibson, he takes it to different (and considerably less opinionated) places. I'm also reminded of something Umberto Eco wrote in Turning Back the Clock, which I've unfortunately lent to a friend, but which goes something along the lines of how the "Big Brother is watching you" theme is hopelessly antiquated; it can be much scarier to live in a world with 6 billion big brothers all watching each other with no way of knowing who is working for whom.

"The pop star, as we knew her" – and here he bowed slightly, in her direction – "was actually an artefact of preubiquitous media."
"Of -?"
"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."
"As opposed to?"
"Comprising it."

Spook Country is a very multifaceted novel, touching upon technology, religion, politics, art, war, capitalism... One of those facets is a thriller, and much like with Pattern Recognition, I find myself intrigued more by the setup than with the actual plot resolution. Not so much because some of it's been done before (been watching Goldfinger, William?) but because it feels like there's something disjointed here; as if he hasn't quite thought the plot through all the way, and drops some of the interesting observations on the world in favour of a more plot-driven approach and a somewhat unsatisfactory ending about 2/3 in. It's still very intriguing – hell, I read the last 130 pages or so in one sitting – but some part of me still feels like it's a great exhibition followed by a slightly flawed dismount. His repeating some of the plot devices from Pattern Recognition probably adds to that. That's probably the reason I find myself thinking it could have been better, and I'm only going to give it a strong . But on a whole, it's a fascinating and more than slightly spooky novel. It feels like Gibson has come full circle, catching up to his younger self as the world has caught up to what, back then, sounded like science fiction, only now with much more meat on his bones. We are living in the future,
We're all driving rocket ships and talkin' with our minds
Wearin' turquoise jewelry and standing in soup lines.(less)

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Jan 05, 2013 Peterh rated it 4 of 5 stars

William Gibson has come a long way since Neuromancer. Spook Country, like Gibson's earlier works, is an impeccably cool reflection of zeitgeist that made it possible. But the writing is much clearer than his earlier novels. Clearer, even, than Pattern Recognition, the book that immediately preceded this one. And Gibson's writing is now relentlessly modern, while still holding to itself a sort of science fiction aura.

Spook Country is an excellent exercise in style, and makes Gibson seem like a na...more

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About William Gibson

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, having coined the term cyberspace in 1982 and popularized it in his first novel, Neuromancer(1984), which has sold more than 6.5 million copies wor...more

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“Secrets...are the very root of cool.” — 26 people liked it

“Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.” — 13 people liked it

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Spook Country (Blue Ant #2)

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