Included in the following reviews are a couple of williamgibsonboard.com related mentions. He comments on Node magazine actually coming into existence and about his postings on this site while he was writing Spook Country...

Austin American Statesman

quote:

"Spook Country" takes its place alongside Bruce Sterling's Leggy Starlitz series and Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" as an ultra-contemporary work by a recovering cyberpunk author. Thankfully, Gibson's past makes him particularly well-adapted to the task of commenting on the future that haunts our present. Better still, he hasn't forgotten how to write a fun story, even if there aren't any kung-fu cyborgs in sight.

Santa Cruz Sentinel

quote:

An examination of today's global zeitgeist, "Spook Country" borrows from world cultures, including Russian, Chinese, French, Swiss, Canadian, Iraqi, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Irish, Korean and Costa Rican.

The story climaxes when the far-flung characters — a member of a Cuban-American crime family, a Belgian businessman, a journalist, an artist — converge on Vancouver, having de-coded the necessary secrets.

Whether they've done so by mining digital data or tapping into free-standing human intelligence, the players all operate on the theory that "secrets are the very root of cool;" they are what separates the future from the past. [...]

"Someone's already named a Web site after NODE, the nonexistent magazine in 'Spook Country,' " he said. "It's sort of scary"

Newsday.com

quote:

There's a sentence in the middle of William Gibson's new novel, "Spook Country," that I haven't been able to get out of my head: "He closed his own eyes, and flew through the night, somewhere above the country he hoped was still America." You don't need to know the specifics of that sentence for it to worm its way into your dreams. It could be a poetic summation of the dazed, mournful quality of Gibson's last novel, "Pattern Recognition," with its evocation of post-9/11 displacement, the sense of a world in which nothing seems fixed or reassuring.

"Spook Country" touches much more specifically on America's political - and thus moral - state since then. There are only a few references to Iraq, but the war is everywhere in this book. It's present in the manner of something that's seeped so fully into the texture of everyday life that we need not even mention it. And so there's an oppressiveness to the atmosphere of the book. Gibson is neither a hopeless nor a cynical writer. "Spook Country," though, imparts a feeling of a country diminished, separate, a time when the highest aspiration can be no more than surviving with some kind of humanity and integrity intact.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

quote:

"Spook Country" is very current. The Iraqi occupation and Homeland Security play key roles and a character speculates "that America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11."

PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW

quote:

While writing "Spook Country," Gibson decided to try a new gambit. Inspired by an article he did for Wired magazine on mash-up culture (musicians posting music on Web sites for others to re-work and re-shape), he posted snippets of the novel on his Web site. Using the analogy of a baker placing pies on a windowsill, readers were encouraged to respond with comments, or even add their own ingredients.

"At least the people who bothered to post were going 'That's intriguing' or 'Wow, that's interesting,' " he says. "And that was encouraging. Writing is super lonely, super solitary. Between books, previously, there's never been much sense of there being an audience. I found it encouraging. It was good to do, and I'll probably do it again."

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From Time Magazine:

quote:

SPOOK COUNTRY

By William Gibson; 371 pages

REVIEW

No Time Like The Present

The term cyberspace was coined by the science-fiction writer William Gibson, who used it in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, a description of an exhausted, seedy, cyborganic future that remains one of the most important works of fiction written in the past 30 years. Since then, while the rest of us have moved forward in time, Gibson's books have moved backward, to the point where we meet in something closely resembling the present in his ninth novel, Spook Country.

Gibson's novels often read like an annotated index of his latest obsessions, or maybe his web bookmarks. Judging by Spook Country, that list currently includes shipping containers, GPS, $100 bills, high-end boutique hotels, wi-fi, conceptual art, homeland security, iPods, obscure Bulgarian firearms and 1980s' cult bands--Gibson's heroine, the drolly winsome Hollis Henry, used to sing in one. (When Hollis turns up at a critical moment, somebody remarks dryly, "At least it's not Morrissey.")

The jittery plot--which is hygienically disposable--deals with the search for a shipping container with something yummy and expensive in it. But the point of the novel isn't so much storytelling; it's mapping the global flow of information and the ways it is distorted and inflected by the technologies that transmit it. In that respect, Spook Country is as absolutely contemporary as anything printed on paper can be.

The Pittsburgh Tribune Review is pretty good, considering it's regarded as the rich asshole paper in my area.

Your absolutely right about that Archie. Isn't that the rag owned by that infamous right wing philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife?

Anyways, on a happier note. Here's another addition to the growing number of reviews coming out on Spook Country.

Genre With The Wind

The “father of cyberpunk” pens a new novel of geopolitical paranoia.

quote:

One of the most stunning things about Gibson’s new novel is that even its most outlandish aspects—the GPS wizardry, the gravity-defying parkour, the text-code languages—are verifiably authentic. Even the heist has a real-world counterpart: In early July, a private bank in Baghdad was robbed of $282 million in U.S. currency. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that money wasn’t part of the same pile I’m talking about in Spook Country,” Gibson says. “All of that stuff about how much money the Air Force shipped into Baghdad—that’s real, I didn’t make that up. That was the largest amount of money ever shipped out of the United States, and no one can account for it.”

Spook Country’s gritty wartime cynicism may leave fans from the Neuromancer days jonesing for a less-recognizable world, but Gibson’s latest novel reveals that he’s still growing as a writer. Sure, he’ll always get props for coining the word cyberspace, but he’s interested in something more tangible than paranoid speculations about technological progress. In Spook Country, he finds plenty to write about in the world as we know it, reminding us that these times are weirder than any future we could imagine.

Another day, another couple of reviews....

San Francisco Chronicle
Spies, spooks flit about in war on terror

quote:

"Spook Country" is all about misdirection, performed by artists, performed by governments. Little in it is as it first appears. There's always an illusion, a bit of verbal sleight of hand. As Hubertus Bigend, Hollis' mysterious employer, opines, "Secrets are the root of cool."

Gibson's new novel is both cool and scary. At the end, though, there's an ingenious reversal, one that proves "Spook Country," for all its apparent cynicism, to be oddly optimistic for a ghost story.

New York Sun
A Snag in the Fabric of Things

quote:

What does Mr. Gibson teach us? Politically, "Spook Country" makes a case against torture, ubiquitous surveillance, and data-mining. His first great hero was a hacker, and Mr. Gibson continues to champion the intuitive loner against the totalizing data-cruncher. In a memorable analogy, he compares traditional human intelligence to "breakbulk," the oddball freight that stands out among ziggurats of shipping containers.

But the real news, in "Spook Country," is that much of the flair that Mr. Gibson once brought to descriptions of cyberspace seems to fit perfectly, now, on all kinds of things. Hollis sees, in some video art "a beautifully lumpy porridge of imagery." One character refers to the advertising man's "really interestingly textured bull----." The ad-man himself, apologizing for having to mince his words, explains: "It's as expensively quasi-factual as I can afford to be. Material like this tends to squirm a bit, as you can well imagine." And the ex-CIA man senses, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, "a snag in the fabric of things, bureaucratically."

Steven Shaviro over at The Pinocchio Theory:

quote:

“The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness.” William Gibson’s prose is cool and precise: minimal, low-affect, attuned to surfaces rather than depths. It’s overwrought, filled to bursting with similes and allusions; yet somehow it still manages to feel as if it had been executed skeletally, entirely without flourishes. There’s a sense of density built up in layers, but packaged inside a bland and featureless box; this writing is like a nondescript cargo container (one of the book’s main images) filled with everything from expensive brand names, hi-tech geekery, and the detritus of popular culture to micro-perceptions of psychological shifts that take place just beneath the threshold of conscious attention.

Los Angeles Times

With 'Spook Country,' William Gibson is still carving out his corner of cyberspace
The author of 'Neuromancer' takes another trippy journey into a parallel universe.

quote:

His ninth novel, "Spook Country," which came out this week, takes place in the same world as its predecessor, "Pattern Recognition," the tale of a "coolhunter" who is allergic to logos and brands. The first of his books to be set in the present, that 2003 book expanded Gibson's readership outside the self-enclosed world of science fiction and is regarded as one of the earliest and boldest fictional treatments of 9/11. Its story of mysterious "footage," episodically posted, also presaged aspects of the YouTube phenomenon.

It's too soon to say what the world will come to emulate in "Spook Country," which features high-tech artists, international criminals and an ex-rock star writing for a magazine so ahead of its time that it doesn't exist.

The novel races in several paranoid directions before converging like a high-tech thriller. But it's a thriller so packed with characters and ideas -- including meditations on drugs, religion and a "private Internet," invisible to outsiders -- that even Gibson isn't quite sure what it's about. "Really," he said in his fluted drawl. "I don't know."

USA Today
'Spook Country': A fitful, fast-forward spy tale

quote:

It's to Gibson's credit that he weaves his strands of disparate narrators, protagonists and foils, and his panoply of far-forward technology, into a vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale.

He has managed to convert his cybernetic future into present tense.

Also...

Gibson talks, and whets appetites for Spook.

quote:

Do the contents of the container ultimately matter? What do the situationists have to do with Gibson's last two books? What West Side greasy spoon is the model for the final scene? Why is Spook Country most like Count Zero?

Count Zero is a real favorite of mine so I'm interested if others feel the same way as this writer did that Spook Country is... "most like Count Zero."

This message has been edited. Last edited by: oddmanrush,

quote:

Originally posted by oddmanrush:
Los Angeles Times

With 'Spook Country,' William Gibson is still carving out his corner of cyberspace
The author of 'Neuromancer' takes another trippy journey into a parallel universe.

quote:

His ninth novel, "Spook Country," which came out this week, takes place in the same world as its predecessor, "Pattern Recognition," the tale of a "coolhunter" who is allergic to logos and brands. The first of his books to be set in the present, that 2003 book expanded Gibson's readership outside the self-enclosed world of science fiction and is regarded as one of the earliest and boldest fictional treatments of 9/11. Its story of mysterious "footage," episodically posted, also presaged aspects of the YouTube phenomenon.

It's too soon to say what the world will come to emulate in "Spook Country," which features high-tech artists, international criminals and an ex-rock star writing for a magazine so ahead of its time that it doesn't exist.

The novel races in several paranoid directions before converging like a high-tech thriller. But it's a thriller so packed with characters and ideas -- including meditations on drugs, religion and a "private Internet," invisible to outsiders -- that even Gibson isn't quite sure what it's about. "Really," he said in his fluted drawl. "I don't know."

USA Today
'Spook Country': A fitful, fast-forward spy tale

quote:

It's to Gibson's credit that he weaves his strands of disparate narrators, protagonists and foils, and his panoply of far-forward technology, into a vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale.

He has managed to convert his cybernetic future into present tense.

Also...

Gibson talks, and whets appetites for Spook.

quote:

Do the contents of the container ultimately matter? What do the situationists have to do with Gibson's last two books? What West Side greasy spoon is the model for the final scene? Why is Spook Country most like Count Zero?

Count Zero is a real favorite of mine so I'm interested if others feel the same way as this writer did that Spook Country is... "most like Count Zero."

Well, look at it. SC goes from third person singular limited viewpoint, like Neuro, to thrid person multiple limited, like Count. It's about two men and one woman. Each approximates the ages of the mapped book. Hollis to Marly, Milgrim to Turner, Tito to Bobby. The paradigms having shifted. Bobby is now Milgrim as captured by turner rather than the Voodoo gang. The Voodoo is now Santeria and so forth.

Thanks for those insights UberDog. I haven't read SC yet, so I wasn't aware of those parallels to Count you mentioned. Sure, similar issues, details and plot elements pop up repeatedly in WG's works but Count Zero has always been, for me anyways, the favorite of all Gibson's books. So naturally, I'm very interested when anyone makes comparisons to it.

Salon.com
Now romancer

quote:

How did you discover locative art? It's a very resonant illustration of a recurring theme in your work -- the encroachment of cyberspace into physical reality.

A friend of mine had been sending me links to locative art Web sites and I found it all excessively nerdy and very conceptual. But I was drawn very strongly to the idea that the entire surface of the planet is literally divided up into a digital grid. I read about geo-caching and geo-hacking, but my needs as a storyteller were not being met. So I came up with something that was like the lowbrow version -- locative art that would be on the side of vans or as it would be done by the people whose work is in Juxtapoz magazine. And that generated [the holographic artist character] Alberto and his art, which I like a lot. The cognitive dissonance comes from the idea that this guy's using it to make memorials to River Phoenix and Helmut Newton. [...]

There's always been a political dimension to your work, but "Spook Country" deals, much more than you ever have, with real-world politics.

In 2006, if you invite the zeitgeist in for tea, that's what you're going to get.

And like "Pattern Recognition," it grows out of the aftershocks of 9/11. Do you think our sense of reality -- which to an extent is the subject of all your books -- changed fundamentally after 9/11?

In "Virtual Light" and the two novels that followed it, there's an idea of nodal points in history. In the wake of 9/11, I had a very strong sense that there had been a nodal point. The direction shifted in some deep, fractal sense. I suspect that was a pretty common apprehension globally.

As for how it changed us, when I think about that, what comes to me is a time [author] Bruce Sterling and I were doing something at CNN in Atlanta. This was after the Oklahoma City bombing. We were standing there looking down into the studios. Bruce went into the gift shop and bought these two tacky-looking shot glasses and said, "I'm going to put these on top of my television set for those CNN moments." I said, "What's a CNN moment?" And he said, "When you look up and see the federal building in Oklahoma City lying in smoking ruins, that's a CNN moment. That's as contemporary a moment as we're allowed." His idea is that in order to protect ourselves, we live somewhere in the past, we keep a buffer zone of about five years between us and contemporary reality. Or we did at that point. But when a CNN moment happens we're suddenly right in the present and it's shocking and disturbing and quite remarkable, but then we withdraw again. I think that he was right, but I think that 9/11 somehow blew that out of the water. The idea of a CNN moment doesn't apply in the same way anymore.

There's obviously an element of exhilaration to something like a CNN moment -- or whatever the equivalent is now -- if it's the way we can most fully experience the present.

Absolutely. It's what Fredric Jameson called the "postmodern sublime," which he characterized as the simultaneous apprehension of dread and ecstasy. That's very much to the point in terms of the times we live in.

In both "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country," because you're dealing with real-world locales for the first time, there's a level of specificity that comes off as almost journalistic.

One of the hallmarks of cyberpunk, again according to Bruce Sterling, was hyper-specificity. It's something I really value in fiction as a reader, and I can't imagine not doing it. We live in a world of objects.

Is most of your research done online?

It depends what I'm chasing. If I find something online and it seems resonant I'll use it. Because I'm not a journalist, resonant trumps accurate every time. With online research, there's a major surf factor. I'll often go looking for one thing and by accident find something else so much cooler. That's how I found Volapük, the Russian slang for the Cyrillic approximations on American keyboards. Before I was online, I would spend a ridiculous amount of money on magazines, and I would have a six-inch stack beside my computer. Whenever the prose stopped coming I'd reach over and flip through a magazine. Magazines are by definition aggregators of novelty, so I'd get a condensed hit of what a bunch of journalists thought was novel and interesting, and often it would just spark something. The Web has taken over that function.

How do you think Google has changed your work -- not just the process of writing but the end result?

It's changed the way I view a novel as I'm working on it. It seems to me there's a sort of ghostly, spectral hypertext that surrounds any novel now. It's as though everything we write is a hypertext link. Sometimes I'll think, well, somebody's going to Google this term I just used and it's going to take them back to where I found it. And that's strange.

Someone is essentially doing a hypertext version of "Spook Country" at Node magazine, with chapter summaries and various annotations and illustrations.

Yeah, I've seen that. The amount of effort involved is a bit scary. The entries I've looked at have been remarkably accurate. Oscar Wilde said mirrors and cats are both inherently unhealthy to pay too much attention to, and I think that sort of Web site is in that category for me.

Did you do much fact-checking for the last two books, since you're dealing with real technologies in the real world?

I do try to run the version that I'm turning in to the publisher past technologically literate people to see if I've made any howling mistakes ... But I don't look at the technology that much. I look at what people do with it. That allows me to see the forest in spite of the trees. I remember the first few years after "Neuromancer," techies would write passionate diatribes about what a stupid bullshit book it was because there was never going to be enough bandwidth for this stuff to happen. I wish I'd kept those because I was perfectly ignorant of actual computer science; I made the right guess. I didn't even know what bandwidth really was, but I just assumed there would be a whole bunch more of it, very shortly, enough for the cyberspace of "Neuromancer." And here we are doing it.

TIMESONLINE
Spook Country
By William Gibson.
If this seems less futuristic than his previous novels, it’s us moving forward, not him moving back

quote:

In an afterword to the 2000 edition of Neuromancer, the author Jack Womack speculated that the way Gibson had described the evolution of an internet had influenced the real thing: “What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?”

So back in the here and now – wherever that is – we find Gibson promoting Spook Country in the online role-playing game Second Life, the closest thing yet to the virtual world inhabited permanently by the brain of Bobby Newmark in Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Of course, nothing has evolved exactly as Gibson didn’t predict – he would insist that he was writing fiction, not futurology; the world has “canted” (to use a Gibson word) in an oblique direction. And Gibson has canted with it, the future tense of his fiction fading into a high-speed cruise along the cutting edge of the curve that the rest of us are struggling to keep up with. In his own words: “The future is here already; it just isn’t evenly distributed.” [...]

Spook Country ties in thriller themes that writers who have never toyed with speculative fiction would recognise – Iraq, corruption, shipping piracy – but the codes are hidden on iPods instead of in microdots.

On his website, in the autobiographical section that he calls “source code”, Gibson quotes the veteran American sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe: “Being an only child whose parents are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilisation there, a whole continent but it’s gone. And you alone remember.”

Gibson has created his own civilisation to compensate. And over time – depending on the speed of your own universe – the rest of us have come to inhabit it. Welcome home.

The State
Book review: ‘Spook Country’ follows complex path of post-9/11 mentality

quote:

William Gibson inspects the present, and it is just as weird and wired as you suspect. He sees into the future, and it looks somewhat like the present, except the technology and the paranoia are cranked up even higher.

“Spook Country,” like “Pattern Recognition” in 2005, takes on our 9/11 attitudes and woes. You have to pay attention when reading Gibson, and if you do, you will find “Spook Country” an up-to-the-second thriller that also encompasses a fine joke about our unrelenting fear of the rest of the world (when what we should most fear is ourselves). [...]

It takes quite awhile for the characters to begin converging in a meaningful way; it takes the entire book to answer those basic questions or explain the title, which, like all Gibson does, operates on multiple levels.

But that’s one reason we keep reading, isn’t it?

Gibson is almost genial and therapeutic as he takes us there.

In a Q&A on his Web site, Gibson explains his decision to write about our present times. He notes that books previous to “Pattern Recognition” felt “more like ‘alternate presents’ than imaginary futures,” and that he believes, “Science fiction is always, really, about the period it’s written in, though most people don’t seem to understand that.”

Palm Beach Post
Novelist William Gibson tries techno-noir

quote:

As always in a William Gibson novel, the ideas and concepts fly by fast. He's a bleak architect of our unease and a true visionary, the sort of talent that can throw away something in a sentence or two that another writer would take 250 pages to develop:

"He remembered Alejandro sending him into Strand Books ... for titles printed in particular years, in particular countries, on various specific types of stock. To be purchased for no content other than the blank endpapers, pages Tito had thought of as stories left unwritten, to be filled in by Alejandro with intricately constructed identities."

He also has what seem to be ferocious libertarian tendencies mixed with black humor; he gives a nice little anti-Patriot Act screed to Milgrim, the book's most addled character.

GHOST WORLD

quote:

Gibson clearly understands the technological reality of the present. In the real world, one could say that people are losing their accents among the mystery and jumble of what is now a widespread tech vocabulary: Web 2.0, user-generated content, iPod. Gibson gets this phenomenon, and in the book's carefully crafted world of spatially tagged hypermedia, animated ghosts and intelligence spooks, unwinding technological mysteries becomes, as is noted, the root of cool.

In short, this may be Gibson's most widely accessible book to date, and you need to read it. If you're not a science fiction reader, it shouldn't matter. Spook Country is sci-fi the way Verne's giant submarine is today's mod_perl. Meaning, Gibson is our current leading author in a genre of a different kind, something like "technofutural fiction," and Spook Country becomes a must-read as it further defines this genre.

SPOOK COUNTRY
William Gibson sees the future in the present

quote:

Gibson has always had a gift for description, and he uses it to great effect here. Early on, he describes a character's tattoo: a Tokyo artist's interpretation of an alphabet abstracted until meaningless. Throughout the book, his characters and settings are warped in a similar manner, mundane environments and random bystanders unexpectedly made exotic by his focus on the least likely details. The results are simultaneously wonderful and maddening. Through Gibson's lens, everything -- a takeout meal, an empty hotel room, a stained-glass window -- becomes an alien artifact, unfamiliar and disconnected from its intended purpose. What seem like tantalizing details are dangled, then abandoned; interesting characters are introduced only to be left largely unexplored; and as the book drifts toward its conclusion, it's hard not to wonder just how much any of it really matters.

These literary stylings and the book's ambiguous resolution may not satisfy readers seeking a straightforward thrill ride, but if you've begun to notice that that the lines between reality and science fiction are becoming strangely blurred, you can cling to Spook Country as proof you're not alone.

William Gibson is right there with you.

The Future is Now: William Gibson unplugged. Kinda.

quote:

On the ground, Spook Country is a page-turner. Its core is almost literally labyrinthine, so full of crossed-up by betrayals and secrecy that the story’s very significance is called into question. But this seems part of Gibson’s program. There is not one Spook Country but dozens, maybe hundreds, operating as parallel cells. Like cyberspace, it is everything.

Considered with Pattern Recognition, however, Spook Country becomes even more satisfying. There was no overt need for Gibson to have trickster millionaire Hubertus Bigend serve like some James Bond assignment-master in both books, except to unify them into a broader work: Gibson’s take on the post-9/11 world.

From The L Magazine The L Magazine

Cyberpunk Not Dead
William Gibson Journeys to the 21st Century in Spook Country
James McGirk


My first copy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer was given to me in exchange for contraband, payment for a debt incurred on a small vial of flammable magnesium strips I’d squirreled away from the American Embassy School’s chem lab. I can still see the thin-lipped wince of disappointment on the face of the young British diplomat who gave it to me.

He was a rube, a rookie, new to India, new to the New Delhi American Embassy School and unaware of how valuable little fragments of subculture could be in a country that back then, in 1996, was still under an embargo. The Indian government was levying massive tariffs against imported goods in an effort to protect domestic industry and, in a place where Pringles sold for $10 a can, few, if any, genuine articles of counterculture managed to wriggle their way through government controls.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” read the first line of Neuromancer. Here was this intoxicating vision, an entirely technological view of the world that was both entertaining and terrifically addictive. Cyberpunk fiction is a hybrid of dystopian science fiction and hard-boiled detective novels. It’s punchy, but dense with imagery and bogus technological jargon.

Burying myself in Neuromancer, I could forget the lepers smearing stumps up against our windshield glass every morning, the braying beggars drying cow patties by the side of the road, and the endless expanses of gray and brown cardboard slums. I read the thing more than 40 times.

I was stuck in a country teeming with almost a billion people and 6,000 years of civilization, a place already crowded with history, culture, kings and empires — while back at home in the United States this crystalline high tech was emerging. The Internet, the World Wide Web — I’d only glimpsed these things on summer holidays or read about them in tantalizingly brief articles in Newsweek or Time Asia. I was being left behind, but by reading Neuromancer I could cling to it somehow, even if it was just fiction.

By the time I received my own grubby copy of Neuromancer, the book had been around for over a decade. The story is generated between two poles. It is both an attempt to visualize the place where, as Gibson’s fellow cyberpunk Bruce Sterling put it, “You are when you talk on the telephone… the place between telephones,” and an attempt to capture the germination of consciousness from a cluster of networked computers. Imagine the Internet suddenly evolving into something akin to a massive brain, with each networked computer linked to it functioning like a neuron.

Neuromancer takes place in the not-too-distant future — the Internet exists, as do hackers. Gibson’s description of the Internet is considered by many to be the progenitor of the term “cyberspace” and perhaps even the metaphor of second space formed between users and their machines:

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”

In Neuromancer, what we would now call the Internet is far more visceral than an endless series of pages navigated by a search engine and browser. It’s a frontier. Accessed via a deck that plugs directly into a user’s brain, Gibson’s cyberspace can kill an unwary “Console Cowboy” who strays too close to data encrypted by intrusion countermeasures electronics (ICE).

I won’t ruin the plot, but suffice to say the machines win. This seems to confirm what I heard Gibson say at a reading in 1999, during the release of his novel Idoru: that he is a technological determinist, convinced that technological change determines the pace of history.

Now, more than 20 years after Neuromancer’s release, the technological future that Gibson envisioned seems hilariously naïve. Take computers, for example: given how many software crashes and hardware glitches we endure on a daily basis, why would we willingly plug ourselves into something that might decide to kill us?
The Internet, too, has become something far less visual than the “consensual hallucination” Gibson anticipated. Although it has certainly become as ubiquitous as he thought it would, its form is far, far different than the virtual reality of Neuromancer. It isn’t so much a place as a presence: a thing, a non-space that you can tap into almost anywhere at any time.



Gibson has backed away from technological determinism. September 11th blew apart that hypothesis, proving just how intense forces of religious faith and globalization have been in recent history. He now claims that his science fiction has always been about the present, and his past two novels have both taken place in the present day. His latest, Spook Country, is a serious attempt to visualize the Internet that has arisen, and to properly contextualize the technological realm as one factor among many shaping history.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the book’s title is meant to encapsulate what Gibson envisions as the virtual realm. If it is, Spook Country is both an atmospheric description and a literal place within the book, a reference to the uncanny underworld of spies and government agencies and a metaphor describing the weird non-place that cyberspace has become.

While the stakes are a little lower in Spook Country, or at least more realistic than they are in Neuromancer, the plots are very similar — so similar that Spook Country feels like a conscious redeployment of Neuromancer. Given the complex back-stories informing Spook Country’s characters, it would make sense if it were.
The protagonist is Hollis Henry, a popstar turned journalist hired by Blue Ant, an ad agency appearing in other works of Gibson’s. Hollis is assigned an article about artists who “geo-hack” — meaning they attach their artwork to specific GPS coordinates.

One artist lovingly recreates celebrity death scenes around Los Angeles — River Phoenix’s body slumped outside the Viper Room, Helmut Newton’s car crash outside Chateau Marmot. His images are virtual, visible only by linking to a website at the precise map coordinates; a layer of information draped over the location.

As Hollis probes deeper into the story, she realizes her article is pretext for Blue Ant to gather intelligence on the mysterious producer arranging the technological component of the artwork. This producer also works for another shadowy entity who’s tracking a shipping container through the ocean.

Realizing the potentially sinister implications of this rogue container (i.e. nuclear terrorism), Hollis confronts her boss, who claims his agency is simply indulging in the advertising equivalent of REM sleep. “Secrets… are the very root of cool, he says.”

While Hollis chases the producer from Los Angeles to Vancouver, Gibson follows two more factions squabbling over the container. One is a government contractor and his Russian-speaking, drug-addicted hostage. The pair stalks the next group, a family of former Cuban intelligence agents.

The Cubans, under contract to yet another shadowy entity, have intercepted information about the container. Again, I won’t reveal the rest of the plot other than to mention that all three parties converge on the container and, again, the ambiguously good team manages to prevail. It’s really the same thing that happens in Neuromancer, only set in the present with technology that could actually work.

Neuromancer uses classic film noir elements: its protagonists are the dregs of society, the femme fatale has a hot
bod, and the enemy is rich, corrupt, and at the center of power. Spook Country, on the other hand, seems to reflect a much more mature view of society, and the story takes place among middlemen, all of whom are clued in a little bit, but none of whom is in complete control. None of the new technology on display is completely reliable (even the gadgets of Hollis’s billionaire boss require separate adapters) and all the actors are smaller fish. No faces you’ve seen on television. Functionaries. Bureaucrats.

Things get done in Spook Country the way they’re usually done in real life — a friend of a friend knows somebody, by bureaucratic incompetence, or by sheer luck. It’s the opposite of the heroic outsider dismantling the bad guys with his godlike skill. This muddy realm of links and exchanges, this weird netherworld of
middlemen, is precisely why I delved into the world of Neuromancer as a teenager.

Around about my tenth read of Neuromancer, during the summer vacation before my junior year at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, a family friend of ours was kidnapped while hiking in Kashmir. He was the son of a famous British journalist, snatched up by a group of wannabe militiamen calling themselves the Hazrat Mujahadeen.

The Hazrat Mujahadeen said they were holding the boy hostage until the Indian government released political prisoners in Kashmir and the former Yugoslavia. Naturally, because of who the boy’s father was, the entire foreign press corps flew up to Srinagar (the capital of Kashmir) along with a number of British diplomats and mysterious American bureaucrats. My parents were journalists too, and I came up with them.

We spent nearly four weeks holed up in a ‘houseboat hotel’ floating alongside the banks of Dal Lake with the rest of the press corps. At night we would hear AK-47 fire echoing through the city, and there were constant rumors. Some nights we’d be pulled ashore, with everyone convinced that the militants were planning to drive a motorboat into the hotel and shoot everybody. Sometimes blustering Indian officials would appear, insisting that the militants had killed him or that he was about to be released. The entire ordeal, at least on our end, was conducted through bribery, threats and terse discussions over cups of tea.

This is the atmosphere that Gibson channels in Spook Country. And there is something within this setting, something about the flickering back and forth of rumor and innuendo, of half-truth and suggestion that also speaks to something fundamental about the strangeness of technology interacting with people’s everyday reality.
Toward the end of Spook Country, there’s a scene between the kidnapped Russian translator and the rogue contractor. The two are driving through downtown Vancouver, trying to find a wireless Internet connection that will let them log on to the Internet without a password:

“Milgrim had had no idea that people had these networks in their houses and apartments, the sheer number of them were amazing, nor that they extended so far beyond the owner’s actual property. Some people named them after themselves, some were simply called ‘default,’ or ‘network,’ and some were named things like ‘Dark Harvester’ and ‘Doomsmith.”

While reading Spook Country, I decided to set up a wireless network of my own. When I fired up my modem, I was suddenly confronted with offers to join networks named, “prius,” “Team Vindaloo,” “fuckbush,” and “isitreallysostrange” (after a lyric by the Smiths).

What was so uncanny about this was that I could more or less identify which of my neighbors each network belonged to, simply by looking at the bumper stickers on the cars parked outside. Prius belonged to the owner of the gleaming Toyota Prius, fuckbush to the Subaru spattered with Vote for Obama stickers, isitreallysostrange to the purple Civic with the Smiths vanity plate — each of my neighbors was beaming out his or her own network, not to mention broadcasting a tiny nugget of information about themselves.

In Spook Country, cyberspace, once a different ‘place,’ is being enfolded onto real space. Information floating around cyberspace is becoming a part of the environment, a fragment of perception no different than a ‘real’ memory someone might have attached to specific place. “Would it all be like this, in Alberto’s new world of the locative?” asks Hollis, observing a virtual ruined Statue of Liberty poking out of a Malibu Beach à la Planet of the Apes. “Would it mean the untagged, unscripted world would gradually fill with virtual things, as beautiful or banal as anything encountered on the web already?”

Gibson uses real, identifiable locations for his scenes in Spook Country — real restaurants, streets and squares. This, plus the potent back-stories he’s included with each character, suggests that Gibson is demonstrating that any information someone has about a location — their past, their memories, their religion, their gender, their celebrity status, their ethnicity, their training, even their addictions — will inform the way that he or she perceives a location.

Stretching this new metaphor for cyberspace a little further, of information tethered to a particular location, Gibson also introduces the idea of being able to select between different channels. Of being able to pick and choose what information is attached to a particular location. This was in effect what I was attempting to do in India by reading and re-reading Neuromancer all those years ago, attempting to assimilate its chilly, high-tech aesthetic and overlay it onto the fetid viscerality I experienced every day in New Delhi.

Gibson’s attempt to introduce feeds of information into his new metaphor for cyberspace points to a fairly serious flaw in it. Namely, where are these feeds coming from? While information is unquestionably beginning to be attached to specific locations, at the same time, the idea of cyberspace as a thing, as a mass consensual hallucination that is ‘elsewhere,’ doesn’t seem likely to disappear anytime soon.

The corporate strongholds that console cowboy Case and his cyborg assassin lover Molly tore into continue to exist as enterprise-level corporate intranets. An underworld of illegal file-sharing networks and areas where people can meet and chat back and forth continue to thrive. Still, Spook Country is unquestionably on its way, if it hasn’t already arrived.

Guardian Review of Spook Country

quote:

This is a novel about, and also full of, ghost-signs, or signs that may not be signs, and about the difficulty of telling the difference. Gibson delights in saturating the pages with data that may or may not encode clues for the reader. Does the hexadecimal code for a wi-fi station mean something? What about the phrase "East Van Halen" spraypainted on a dumpster? In this comedy of hermeneutics, the characters play too: "If you knew enough Greek, [Hollis] thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word."

Gibson's prose continues to gleam with a vivid economy, as though he is trying to find the most suggestively unexpected angle. Here is a man with a "curiously nonreflective simulacrum of Kim Jong-il's jet-black haircut". Here is what it is like to suck on a pill: "He wanted to concentrate fully on that instant when the sublingual tablet phase-shifted from being to not-being." This novel is a political thriller that is also a satire on advertising, music and the geekocracy, a finely machined mystery whose main pleasures lie in its rich store of miniature aesthetic jolts and unexpected textures. Gibson country is still a terrain all its own.

There's an interview with WG on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, right now.

The Oregonian
Now you see it, now you could be somewhere else

quote:

Everyone is a bit of a spook, both in the '50s slang for spy, and in the dreamy way of people who aren't connecting to their own lives. All these spooks converge on the city of Vancouver, B.C., and a reader has to pay close attention to follow the caper. It's worth it. Gibson's take on contemporary culture is sharp-edged and sure of itself.

"Spook Country," like Gibson's 2003 "Pattern Recognition," is sparely written compared to his early novels, where the language was dense and rich in technological whimsy, the action unceasing and the pages crowded. There's a lot of white space in "Spook Country," and the chapters are short. But the characters have more interiority. In Gibson's groundbreaking first novel, "Neuromancer," the sky is "the color of TV screen, tuned to a dead channel." In "Spook Country," Tito observes: "The world outside the restaurant's windows . . . was the color of a silver coin, misplaced for years in a drawer."

This is an essential difference in Gibson's new work. A certain silver nitrate tonality has achieved the solidity of an old coin. Everything is contextually human now; the real