Spook Country
January 04, 2009
By rights, William Gibson ought to be out of a job. A 20th century science fiction writer, itself an anachronism in this bookseller's paradise of dwarves, dragons and flat-chested epics, he has built his reputation imagining technologies that were once exotic but are now all too familiar. His debut 1984 novel, Neuromancer, coined the term cyberspace to describe a parallel universe of interlinked, electronic worlds. His short story Johnny Mnemonic imagined a smuggling data in the human brain and uploading a person's memories to a hard drive. Idoru proposed the concept of a completely synthetic pop star. To which anyone with a passing knowledge of the music industry could only ask: which one of the Pussycat Dolls would she look like?
This is the problem with Gibson's future. Not that it's far-fetched, but that we've all got our hands on it. Google is a verb, goggles-and-glove virtual reality is a silly joke and a quick Yahoo search turns up many, if not all, of the author's once esoteric sources. With every passing year science fiction is changing gradually from "what if?" to "Oh, that."
Gibson isn't the only best-selling author facing this dilemma, but he is the only one who's truly dealing to it. His Zen-like response has been to stop looking forward and instead look around, placing his stories firmly in the high-tech everyday. Pattern Recognition was the culmination of this process and easily his best. Spook Country follows close behind.
Spook Country is a spy novel, again an irony. Recall the wringing of hands when the Berlin Wall fell: with no cold war, would cloak and dagger writers be out of a job? After 9/11, no, and Gibson, the ex-futurist dusts off the tropes with the same delight his characters reserve for collectable military antiques.
Tito, a Cuban translator, is smuggling data out of the US in broken iPods. Hollis Henry, a journalist, is hired by a London magazine to track down a phantom conspirator. Milgrim, a junkie, is translating Russian for someone who may or may not be a member of the CIA. Their three-and-a-bit stories march towards the same satisfyingly downbeat anti-climax in sequence rather than causally. Gibson interleaves the narratives in Spook Country, as he did in Idoru and Virtual Light, and the effect is just as frustrating. Just when you get into one character it's off to another. But this spieling jet lag is part of Gibson's message. As the characters hop between the controlled environments of airports and hotel rooms, they're experiencing the true manifestation of virtual reality.†
Spook Country pokes gentle fun at our high tech consumer world and the shallow characters it has produced. Hollis scoffs at a digital artist's neatly pressed punk clothes and accepts her commission from Hubertus Bigend, the advertising genius from Pattern Recognition's Blue Ant. Even the terrorists in pursuit of dark ends are dressed in even darker designer clothes.
Although there is talk of the Twin Towers and the end of Western civilisation, the threat never seems truly real. Milgrim may be a captive of the arms industry but he still has access to drugs, room service and cable TV. Tito is physically threatening but looks, Hollis notes, 'like a very serious fifteen year-old.' Hollis herself may be wracked by guilt but is gifted with the same post modern jouissance that Cayce Pollard expressed in Pattern Recognition. Gibson's kids are alright.
Ultimately, Spook Country is a comforting tale of humans closely observing their shared experience of a highly controlled world: a romp in a walled garden. In the old days such an artificial existence would have been the basis of a science fiction horror story. Now, heaping paradox upon irony, it's the modern world, and a pleasure.
(Sunday Star Times)
This is the problem with Gibson's future. Not that it's far-fetched, but that we've all got our hands on it. Google is a verb, goggles-and-glove virtual reality is a silly joke and a quick Yahoo search turns up many, if not all, of the author's once esoteric sources. With every passing year science fiction is changing gradually from "what if?" to "Oh, that."
Gibson isn't the only best-selling author facing this dilemma, but he is the only one who's truly dealing to it. His Zen-like response has been to stop looking forward and instead look around, placing his stories firmly in the high-tech everyday. Pattern Recognition was the culmination of this process and easily his best. Spook Country follows close behind.
Spook Country is a spy novel, again an irony. Recall the wringing of hands when the Berlin Wall fell: with no cold war, would cloak and dagger writers be out of a job? After 9/11, no, and Gibson, the ex-futurist dusts off the tropes with the same delight his characters reserve for collectable military antiques.
Tito, a Cuban translator, is smuggling data out of the US in broken iPods. Hollis Henry, a journalist, is hired by a London magazine to track down a phantom conspirator. Milgrim, a junkie, is translating Russian for someone who may or may not be a member of the CIA. Their three-and-a-bit stories march towards the same satisfyingly downbeat anti-climax in sequence rather than causally. Gibson interleaves the narratives in Spook Country, as he did in Idoru and Virtual Light, and the effect is just as frustrating. Just when you get into one character it's off to another. But this spieling jet lag is part of Gibson's message. As the characters hop between the controlled environments of airports and hotel rooms, they're experiencing the true manifestation of virtual reality.†
Spook Country pokes gentle fun at our high tech consumer world and the shallow characters it has produced. Hollis scoffs at a digital artist's neatly pressed punk clothes and accepts her commission from Hubertus Bigend, the advertising genius from Pattern Recognition's Blue Ant. Even the terrorists in pursuit of dark ends are dressed in even darker designer clothes.
Although there is talk of the Twin Towers and the end of Western civilisation, the threat never seems truly real. Milgrim may be a captive of the arms industry but he still has access to drugs, room service and cable TV. Tito is physically threatening but looks, Hollis notes, 'like a very serious fifteen year-old.' Hollis herself may be wracked by guilt but is gifted with the same post modern jouissance that Cayce Pollard expressed in Pattern Recognition. Gibson's kids are alright.
Ultimately, Spook Country is a comforting tale of humans closely observing their shared experience of a highly controlled world: a romp in a walled garden. In the old days such an artificial existence would have been the basis of a science fiction horror story. Now, heaping paradox upon irony, it's the modern world, and a pleasure.
(Sunday Star Times)