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On the strength of William Gibson's latest novel, it looks as if he will finally transcend his niche reputation as the originator of cyberpunk.

As he slides effortlessly into the genre of hi-tech thriller, he seems even more at home than he was writing sci-fi.

The real world has arguably plagiarised Gibson's future-visions since the 1980s, and Spook Country captures, in a contemporary setting, everything that made his earlier work such a shock to the system.

The extremely complicated plot unfolds at a measured pace, starting with a reporter hired to look for a missing man and ending up with war-profiteering in Iraq.

The only let-down is that initially the style has literary touches which offer the promise of Gibson emerging as a hypermodern Le Carré – but, as is so often the case in thrillers, the prose is streamlined down to the functional minimum as the plot develops.

Nonetheless, this is a neat, up-to-the-minute spy thriller – and if you doubted Gibson's talent before, it is time to reconsider.

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As fresh and clever as the innovative locative art that opens the book, Gibson keeps the plot twisting, weaving dark and dangerous elements in a series of fascinating scenes.

Whether he's taking you inside the surprisingly lucid mind of Milgrim or into the semi-mystical world of Tito, where superb training mixes with the guidance of ancient gods, Gibson holds readers spellbound.

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Originally posted by Sentinel400:
Technically, Hollis is acting as a reporter for Node magazine, right?

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IDEAS: How did you first come upon voodoo, and its Afro-Cuban relative, Santeria, which plays a large role in "Spook Country"?

GIBSON: When I was 12, or maybe a little younger, I was building Heath Kits, electronic kits you send away for and solder together. Around that time, I happened to run across a book about voodoo in New Orleans. Reading it, I kept thinking about the ritual symbols for the different gods, and how much they resembled the circuit diagrams that came with my Heath Kit. I used to wonder what would happen if you wired those circuits.

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GIBSON: The only native culture I ever had was science fiction -- and rock 'n' roll.

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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 Sept. 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).

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Chapters of "Spook Country" alternate among those three characters on what first seem to be separate quests. Much of the technology they encounter sounds like something Gibson invented, from locative art, which combines virtual reality and GPS to re-create actual events, to a bed that floats in midair by magnetic levitation.

They're all real. Gibson says he switched from writing about the future and inventing technological developments when he realized he "could probably write a novel set in the present that would create the same effect for the reader."

"It's really a matter of finding existing artifacts and importing them into that context," he says. "Found objects are more believable, and usually more peculiar, than invented ones."

Gibson also is interested in how, and how quickly, we adapt to new technologies. "We think of computers as technology, but I think we think of TV as part of the natural world."

Gibson says when he talks about technology, he includes "farming, making bread, everything we've had to learn how to do to get to where we are. We're somewhere up on the side of a mountain of that stuff by now."

All of those technological changes have shaped human behavior in ways big and small that attract his attention. Take the hoodie, that uniform of the young. What does it have to do with technology?

"The early ubiquity in London of the hoodie had everything to do with closed-circuit TV surveillance" becoming widespread there, Gibson says. "Going into the Tube (London's subway) and putting your hood up becomes a gesture of defiance."

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Originally posted by ArkanGL:
I like the bit about the hoodies.
I didn't know about that.

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Originally posted by Sentinel400:
Technically, Hollis is acting as a reporter for Node magazine, right?

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Originally posted by Kradlum:
But she was hired to write a story on locative art. I can't think of a "missing man" in SC, unless they are talking about Bobby, who is more a recluse than missing.

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Gibson jumps rapidly between the three strands of the treasure hunt until all of the characters converge in Vancouver. It is here that the cargo ship carrying the container arrives in port, and things start to get a bit intense: Tito becomes absurdly acrobatic; Milgrim gets a lucky break after a car crash; and Hollis is witness to an extraordinary act of sabotage, which seems to be motivated more by moral and political obligation than by greed.

Despite so much hyperactivity, Spook Country has a considered message: beneath this slightly ridiculous cast of Mac-savvy design junkies, with their funny names and comic-book troubles, is a sharp analysis of the international impact of America's "war on terror", and of the way that globalisation allows unseen organisations to access information and wealth. The unique quality of Gibson's writing also mitigates any silliness: he extracts a dazzled beauty from his distinctive brand of tech-speak, and his descriptions of place are brilliant. Pattern Recognition brought London, Tokyo and Moscow vividly to life; Spook Country does the same for LA, New York and Vancouver. He is a superb writer of cities.

In being so self-consciously of the moment, it's impossible to guess how well Spook Country will date. But for now at least, Gibson has delivered a compulsive and deeply intelligent literary thriller, which, in those moments when it pauses for breath, manages to say a great deal about the disturbances of a post-9/11, post-Iraq world.

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Oh my god, it's full of spoilers.