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.
William Gibson’s Blue Ant series theme seems to be the post Cold War / post 9.11 world where governments, government agencies, intelligence groups and powerful global entities have made paradigm shifts in their focus and world view.Blue Ant is a global marketing agency led by Belgian Hubertus Bigend and operated out of London. Bigend sees modern advertising as “reverse espionage” and finds that his special projects involving post-cyberpunk underground investigations akin to an organisms need for sleep and dreams.In Spook Country, Gibson’s 2007 publication and (sort of) sequel to his novel Pattern Recognition (2003) and followed by Zero History in 2010 – we find Bigend engaging the services of Hollis Henry, a former world celebrity cutting her teeth in journalism but never completely leaving behind her status as a famed rock star. Hollis encounters visual and virtual artists and other locative technology specialists in her investigation that leads her to underground engagements.Gibson’s narrative follows Hollis but she shares time with two other plotlines: one with a hostage translator kept by a former special forces thug and the third storyline with a group led by a former CIA agent and focusing on a Cuban-Chinese family of special operatives.Like Pattern Recognition, Gibson wastes little time with lengthy foundations and intricately explained characterizations. The pace is fast and with little clues as to what’s happening; so the reader gets only a brisk introduction and really figures things out towards the middle of the book. Gibson is too good a writer to lose his audience though, as the language is sophisticated and engaging.Readers may be put off by the trifecta of protagonists, but Gibson expertly weaves the three loosely connected storylines together and his fiction has the look and feel of a corporate espionage over watch, which is really where Bigend seems to fit in; almost as a smooth European Charley to the action setting Angels.Gibson’s earlier cyberpunk incantations are revisited here through his exposition of locative art and, like his post/Cold War and post 9/11 themes, this element of Spook Country seems to again declare Gibson’s role as a chronicler of the here and now, an in depth current historian with his finger on the pulse of the world culture as it is perhaps in only the very near future.Is this science fiction? The setting is the current time, perhaps a step ahead, but Gibson’s attention in Spook Country is more on the speculative fiction of the Now rather than future world building.Urbane and thrilling with a cool delivery, Gibson has crafted another very readable page-turner.
What do You think about Spook Country (2007)?
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
—Enrique Ramirez
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 journalist. The start-up magazine for which she works has given her an assignment that's really little more than a cover. They hope that as she investigates locative technology in art, she'll also uncover the where-abouts of a mysterious cargo container. Without her knowledge, of course. There are two other characters we follow in the course of the narrative, neither of whom know the whole story either.By keeping the characters and the readers in the dark about the narrative thread, Gibson creates a paranoid feeling that mimics that of the world we find ourselves living in. A world where, as one of the characters says, "America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11."This is the second novel set in the "real world" by Gibson; a sort of follow up to Pattern Recognition. These two novels share one character between them: Advertising magnate, Hubertus Bigend. While not a huge presence in either book, he is the force that motivates both narratives. Again, Gibson is telling us something about the world we live in.Gibson's writing here is bare-bones spare, but beautiful. He has the ability to turn a phrase that can stop the reader dead for a moment, but that then compels you to continue. To race to the completely satisfying conclusion.
—Adam
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 Capitalized Category for it), Gibson is fantastic at it. But I wanted a Chuck Jones steam-whistles-out-my-ears moment, and what I got was a decent yarn. So, you know, hooray! But not not wahoo!
—Jeff
