Spook Country

Author - William Gibson ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Berkley Trade was reviewed on 19-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Spook Country by Berkley Trade. Gibson, for me was always an automatic read. Still is. Since I have recently read ´easy´ novels (like Twilight, on the request of my daughter), I was slowed and confused by the first couple of pages. I forgot what a constant wall of cultural references was like, and how it makes one think. Then it becomes fun, and interesting.

I am no longer impressed by gratuitous wacky descriptions, like "the sky was like the polished steel of an assassin´s blade" - not the Gibson ever says that, but he more or less perfected the art. He has a whole new batch of that stuff for this novel. Some of it is fun, and some I just gloss over. I must admit that I am his ideal audience because I more or less ´got´ all of his references, and cultural/technical references are the joie de vivre of this novel.

I liked the spy part: very smart, and I was only slightly disappointed when I guessed the ending 50 pages before the end. That didn´t keep me from staying up two hours too late just to get to it. It closes nicely, I was never bored.

What I didn´t like was the political aspect of it. I am perfectly capable of forming my own conspiracy theories about the Iraq war, which are not really incompatible with his, but I´m both intrigued and disgruntled to find that in a ´spy´ novel.

Yes, I´ll still buy, and read his next novel. He hasn´t turned me off as bad as Neil Stephenson did with that boring ´Baroque Cycle´ thing (blech), or David Brin with ´Infinity´s Shore´ (double blech). How do great authors get boring? I´m still a Gibson fan.
¤

2) Paperback Book Spook Country by Berkley Trade. This book reads like a chore. The style is smug, the plot is plodding, and the abrupt chapters make it impossible to become truly immersed in it. There are a few redeeming qualities here, but don´t waste your time sifting through this swamp to get to them. Read this book if you´re stuck in an elevator, otherwise, move on.¤

3) Paperback Book Spook Country by Berkley Trade. I´ve been reading William Gibson since he was first hailed as the Cyberpunk messiah back in the late Eighties. At the risk of being savaged for this review, all these years later, I am still asking myself why this guy is so popular as an author and why I keep falling for the marketing hoopla and buying his books. He is not a bad author but he is certainly not a great one either. Spook country isn´t any better than previous novels, nor is it any worse, it´s just another mediocre book. Frankly, I have found all his books tolerable but none of them particularly exciting, memorable or terribly inventive.

Gibson gets a lot of mainstream recognition in the press for his books but honestly there are much better Science Fiction authors out there and even many better Cyberpunk authors out there. Bruce Sterling, who came up the ranks at the same time as Gibson, even colloborated with him on occasion, wrote more inventive and imaginative fiction but never got the same level of recognition. Many other authors since then have written extremely good cyberpunk including Richard Morgan´s Altered Carbon, Neal Stephenson´s The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady´s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) and Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book), and Peter Hamilton´s Greg Mandel series which starts with Mindstar Rising.

I´m not bashing on Gibson, more power to him that he captured the mainstream attention, I´m merely trying to point out that in my honest opinion he is certainly not the best writer in the field. I think I actually enjoyed Spook Country a little more than most of his fiction, particularly because of the Cubano/Asian crime family in NYC city he introduces into the story. They were particularly interesting in this story of a missing shipping container and the secretive manouverings of the government, billionaires, and rogue espionage agents who are all contending against each other in a race to be the first to find the container. The denouement was well thought out and satisfying and in general I don´t have a lot of negatives to say about the book. After finishing it though my thoughts were simply that this was an OK book, not a wonderful one, and I think Gibson gets a lot of attention that other writers may more appropriately merit.¤

4) Paperback Book Spook Country by Berkley Trade. This is a bad book; boring, pedantic and most damning of all, behind the times. Gibson has had a long slow fall since the heady and exciting days of Neuromancer. He may have hit bottom with this book so I suppose we can hope that he will bounce back with his next one?

Come on Will, write like you used to!¤

5) Paperback Book Spook Country by Berkley Trade. I´ve never read a book by this author that disappointed me. This latest work by him continues his increasingly evolved and highly distinctive style of writing. Some of the chapters in this book are a page, koan-like in their effect; some are much longer, approaching the length more familiar to readers. In presenting several alternative lines of narrative that gradually intersect and twine to create the capstone of the story, Gibson conjures the texture of life, which is less like an everything-explained-point A-to point B event, than it is variously fragmented, more or less comprehensible and clear. This book invokes both the Orishas of Cuban voudon and the technology of assassination. As with all of Gibson´s work, the outcome is ambivalent, partially hidden and seen. For those who require a traditional, linear story line with all things made plain and finished, this will prove an irritating and disappointing read. For the rest of us, it is exceptional.¤

6) Paperback Book Spook Country by Berkley Trade. The New York Times bestseller from “one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present.”( Washington Post Book World)

Hollis Henry is a journalist on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo is a producer working on cutting-edge art installations. In his day job, Bobby is a trouble-shooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one.

Hollis Henry has been told to find him.¤

7) Paperback Book Spook Country by Berkley Trade. Now that the present has caught up with William Gibson´s vision of the future, which made him the most influential science fiction writer of the past quarter century, he has started writing about a time--our time--in which everyday life feels like science fiction. With his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, the challenge of writing about the present-day world drove him to create perhaps his best novel yet, and in Spook Country he remains at the top of his game. It´s a stripped-down thriller that reads like the best DeLillo (or the best Gibson), with the lives of a half-dozen evocative characters connected by a tightly converging plot and by the general senses of unease and wonder in our networked, post-9/11 time.

Across the Border to Spook Country

For the last few decades, William Gibson, who grew up in Virginia and elsewhere in the United States, has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, just across the border from Amazon.com´s Seattle headquarters, which made for a short drive for a lunchtime interview before the release of Spook Country. We met just a few miles from where the storylines of the new novel, in a rare scene set in Gibson´s own city, converge. You can read the full transcript of the interview, in which we discussed, among other things, writing in the age of Google, visiting the Second Life virtual world, the possibilities of science fiction in an age of rapid change, and his original proposal for Spook Country, which we have available for viewing on our site. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

Amazon.com: Could you start by telling us a little bit about the scenario of the new book?

William Gibson: It´s a book in which shadowy and mysterious characters are using New York´s smallest crime family, a sort of boutique operation of smugglers and so-called illegal facilitators, to get something into North America. And you have to hang around to the end of the book to find out what they´re doing. So I guess it´s a caper novel in that regard.

Amazon.com: The line on your last book, Pattern Recognition was that the present had caught up with William Gibson´s future. So many of the things you imagined have come true that in a way it seems like we´re all living in science fiction now. Is that the way you felt when you came to write that book, that the real world had caught up with your ideas?

Gibson: Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I´m going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I´m going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. ´Cause I´m going to have to go beyond that. And I think over the course of these last two books--I don´t think I´m done yet--I´ve been getting a yardstick together. But I don´t know if I´ll be able to do it again. I don´t know if I´ll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the ´80s and ´90s--as strange as it may seem to say this--we had such luxury of stability. Things weren´t changing quite so quickly in the ´80s and ´90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don´t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.

Amazon.com: Now that you´re writing about the present, do you consider yourself a science fiction writer these days? Because the marketplace still does.

Gibson: I never really believed in the separation. But science fiction is definitely where I´m from. Science fiction is my native literary culture. It´s what I started reading, and I think the thing that actually makes me a bit different than some of the science fiction writers I´ve met who are my own age is that I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs in the same week. And I started reading Beat poets a year later, and got that in the mix. That really changed the direction. But it seems like such an old-fashioned way of looking at things. And it´s better not to be pinned down. It´s a matter of where you´re allowed to park. If you can park in the science fiction bookstore, that´s good. If you can park in the other bookstore, that´s really good. If people come and buy it at Amazon, that´s really good.

I´m sure I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails. But that just the way it is. All of that stuff reads so differently now. I think nothing dates more quickly than science fiction. Nothing dates more quickly than an imaginary future. It´s acquiring a patina of quaintness even before you´ve got it in the envelope to send to the publisher.

Amazon.com: So do you think that´s your own career path, that you´re less interested in imagining a future, or do you think that the world is changing?

Gibson: I think it´s actually both. Until fairly recently, I had assumed that it was me, me being drawn to use this toolkit I´d acquired when I was a teenager, and using my old SF toolkit in some kind of attempt at naturalism, 21st-century naturalistic fiction. But over the last five to six years it´s started to seem to me that there´s something else going on as well, that maybe we´re in what the characters in my novel Idoru call a "nodal point," or a series of them. We´re in a place where things could just go anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross´s argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It´s not going to happen. We´re not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it´s so convincing. I read that and I´m like, "My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child."

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 16-Nov-2008, 04252214159780425221419, 500-960-990-150-730-Y6B-MYB-8

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