Spook Country

Gibson's writing has always struck me, and many others, as utterly cutting-edge; his career has spanned decades already, and yet each new work hits a note of ultra-modernity that is both futuristic and completely situated in its own era. The distance between future and present has narrowed, until we discover that Gibson is no longer writing science fiction: he's writing about today, and through his eyes, we discover we're already living in the future.

In Spook Country, we follow three very different groups of people converging upon an enigmatic shipping container. Hollis is a cultural journalist who thought she was covering a new virtual art form; Tito is a martial artist and member of a criminal family; Milgrim is an addict whose desire for perfect chemical peace keeps leading him into conflict.

Gibson's prose is beautifully clean, contemporary and cool. His descriptions, as always, are intensely visual and spot-on. Odile, a young French hipster, wears "a black XXXL sweatshirt from some long-dead start-up, men's brown ribbed-nylon socks of a peculiarly nasty sheen, and see-through plastic sandals the colour of cherry cough syrup." I swear I saw this girl working at one of the new bars on Ossington the other day.

In this icy, spacious atmosphere, each of the characters search obliquely for meaning and community. The shipping container is like the Holy Grail of capitalism, its emptiness containing the possibility of a hundred kinds of new and shining commercial goods; but it's also the promise of a world where everything can be located, and with the right eyes, even the most cryptic language can be understood. Hollis, Tito and Milgrim each exist in separate solitudes, yet by the end of the book they begin to forge new connections in new ways.

More meditative and less plot-driven than Gibson's earlier work, Spook Country paces the edge between genres: it has the philosophical scope of science fiction, the character depth of literary fiction, and the spare, well-chosen vocabulary of poetry.

I found the book uneven at times, but not nearly as trying as the previous reviewers. Atmosphere is everything in Gibson's books; this has it in spades. Even with limited plot.

I've followed several of the old cyberpunk writers (and the good ones are getting up there now). Gibson and Neal Stephenson are leaving much of their early work behind... and their writing has improved.

I feel this may end as a trilogy. If so, the second unit of Gibson's trilogies tend to be the weaker of the sisters (possibly excluding 'Neuromancer').

I look forward to the next.

While this book is not horrible, it certainly doesn't deliver on what I've come to expect from William Gibson. The central story revolves around GPS inspired technology and Cuban spies. Some parts of the story feel like they were lifted out of his previous books, recolored and used again.
If you are just ooking for a book to pass the time, it is still a fine story, but I hope Gibson's next book returns to the quality I enjoy.

A point blank review of Spook Country by William Gibson
Posted in Uncategorized by chrisbradley on the October 4th, 2007

Let's get started on the best note possible. William Gibson stated yesterday in the California Literary Review that Spook Country was a "contractual obligation" and that he started with a "blank page" and found himself in "varying degrees of distress" during the task of publishing it.

For every reason stated above, and the fact that it is a dry uninspired read at best, it is not worth spending one red cent on. His work has become no better than Steven King's work since the release of Pattern Recognition in 2003, and he is willing to admit, that he is no longer interested in writing about the future.

If I were tied to a "contractual obligation" I don't think I would feel that inspired to write anything particularly new or different either. Especially if I were aware the Publishers were screwing me out of a good portion of the profits.

So, with these things in mind, lets talk about the story and the characters. Brown is a psychopathic failed government agent who is holding Milgrim hostage. Milgrim is addicted to psychotropic speed analogs. They are in New York at the start of the work. Hollis Henry, a pop singer from a band called the Curfew (not far from Curve or the Cure in name) has had a failed career and is making a last ditch effort as a Journalist for an Internet rag called the node. Except that she never writes a single significant word in the entire novel. The container she ends up searching for is ultimately filled with U.S. Government Money (literally 100.00 bills) and it is a ruse that makes her a possible target for a Chinese / Cuban group intent on tagging the money with Cesium. She starts in Los Angeles and Everyone ends up in Vancouver at the conclusion. The Cubans main characters are a kid named Tito and a guy with the Gun to tag the money inside the Shipping Container.

There is a bit about stealing a Glock from a drug dealer, and that's about as much action as takes place in the book. The sequence in New York where Brown is madly trying to procure an Ipod containing data from Tito is a miserable, uninventive look at Union Square, and involves automobiles very rarely.

The big excitement in Milgrim's life is getting a haircut and a Makeover paid for in Washington D.C. by Brown's attache's before boarding a Jetstream to Vancouver where he appears to lose his mind completely. Crashing a car in an attempt to kill Tito. At which point Milgrim escapes, snatches Hollis Henry's purse which contains 5000.00 given to her by proxy from a dead band mate, heroin overdose, who could have figured? Which lands him in a bed and breakfast having a nice egg breakfast on his way out to roam the streets.

That about sums it up. There's nothing more to it. It was the most uninteresting, formula driven work that Gibson has ever written. And the Locative art and GPS opening sequences with Bobby Chombo are so lost in the gratuitous waste of language that they are hardly worth reflecting on. It leaves a big "So what?" in my mind.

I am glad Gibson is admitting that his publishing company is doing him no good, and I suggest that he continue to do so, and "dropkick the chihuawa's into the soup." Because they are just like PRADA bags, trendy, hollow, purchased by vindictive people, and generally bred for all the wrong reasons.

I am glad I bought the book, but maybe Penguin Putnam should rethink their marketing strategy before alienating their customers with tripe that isn't worth the toilet paper it was manufactured on. In today's world, now that he is the Godfather of Cyberpunk, Gibson could have as easily signed his name on a bag of old tomatoes, and they would sell for $17.00.

And he knows it. And he will do it again.