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Spook Country by William Gibson List Price: $25.95 Price: $2.75 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. You Save: $23.20 (89%)

Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.

Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.

Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.

Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post "rave."

Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), "One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century."

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."

Customer Reviews:
Not bad to pass some time, but disappointing for Gibson fans	Customer Rating: 3 out of 5
Most of what I'd like to say about this book has already been said, so I'll just underline a few things. -There are a few fun characters in the book which make it worth reading, but the protagonist is boring and unlikeable. -Like in the other trilogies, there is some voodoo-type nonsense worked in to one of the story arcs, which I have never found to be an effective story device. -Things start to get a bit exciting towards the climax, but the denouement is a big let down (I had to double-check to make sure the last chapter hadn't been left out of my copy, I couldn't quite believe what I had just read was supposed to be considered an ending). I'll still buy Gibson's next book, but hopefully he'll just let this Hubertus Bigass thing just die.
I admit, I didn't try very hard	Customer Rating: 1 out of 5
But after two chapters I gave up. I picked this book up because it was only $1 and the cover looked cool. In the first two chapters, there is no plot given, some characters are introduced, but not fleshed out to any extent that you would actually care about them. The chapters are completely disjoint. My copy is double spaced, which makes me feel like the author needed to make his book longer without adding anything. There's too much elaboration on things that aren't important. For example: "She wore 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 color of cherry cough syrup." I don't know why XXXL vs. XL vs. M matters. If you're trying to show that it's too big on her, just say so. It would be better if you mentioned what long-dead start-up it was. Maybe I wouldn't know them, but I would be able to intuit that it was some company or a band or whatever. Instead, I have to read 4 words that don't give me any more information. I have no idea what you mean by 'nasty sheen.' Are they dirty? An ugly color? The only part that isn't crappy is the part about the sandals, but in the end, do I even care what she's wearing? No. Another example: "Fifteen minutes later, having done the best she could with all that had never been quite right, she descended to the lobby in a Philippe Starck elevator, determined to pay its particulars as little attention as possible. She'd once read an article about Starck that said the designer owned an oyster farm where only perfectly square oysters were grown, in specially fabricated steel frames." I wish the author would pay less attention to the details, too. I don't need to know background details on someone who made the elevator the character is riding in. I tried skipping to a couple random spots to see if anything exciting was happening, but there wasn't. The white lego robot thing apparently plays some part in the story, but that is not enough to make me read 82 more chapters.
hard start	Customer Rating: 2 out of 5
I am having a hard time starting this book, but I will try to read it thru, so I will be back
HUH???	Customer Rating: 1 out of 5
This has to have been one of the worst books I've ever read. It's almost as if Mr. Gibson wrote this book to be confusing, jumbled and almost impossible to follow on purpose! By the second chapter I wasn't sure I cared about any of the characters, but by the seventh I was positive. By the time I got to the end I was just begging to get the pain over with. This is not William Gibson at his best. In fact this is the worst thing I've read by him.
A Failure of Pythonic Proportions!	Customer Rating: 1 out of 5
Save for a few chapters, this was a complete waste of time. Gibson cannot write compelling female protagonists. Hollis Henry is an amorphous, listless main character. Why create a protagonist that, by all indications, does not have the slightest care about her own pursuits? Hollis could have been written out of the novel completely and the tale still told, albeit with the same anticlimactic drone of an air conditioner. The book is so awkwardly and artificially constructed, the reader can almost imagine the Post-It notes working backwards to make sure that each plot hole is cemented over, each improbable twist counteracted by some sudden spike in awareness on the part of one or another character. Every single character in this book is a clumsily placed plot device. Hubertus Bigend is a hyper-curious, super-rich, man-baby, with tentacles in so many industries he seems omniscient. The problem is, as was the case in Pattern Recognition, if he's so powerful, so rich, and so smart, why bother with the supporting cast? They're obviously just ignorant pawns acting as insulation (good chapter though - Insulation) in case of some operation going wrong. The book could have been a fictional biography, a "Where are they now?" piece on The Curfew. Here's how they got back together, despite the tragic heroine-related death of Jimmy their drummer, they've rallied around to support Hollis in her adventure as she gets wrapped up with something much bigger than she could ever know. This fictional piece could have been 4 pages and run in an issue of Rolling Stone. Alternately, the book could have been a few hundred pages, removed Hollis' character, Hubertus Bigend and his wealth and resources, the band-members relationships, and just focused on Chombo, Tito, Brown and Milgrim, The Family and The Old Man, it may have been good. Oh, and remove the references to augmented reality as art. It doesn't lend any techno-cred to the piece, it just falls flat and feels pointless. So I don't have to preface this with "spoilers ahead", I won't cite specifically just how badly anticlimactic this book is, but let's just say that the antagonist's part (which is really subjective, I believe intentionally) ends in a ridiculous manner, of Monty Python proportions. (Specifically, Holy Grail proportions.) Further, when is clicks with the reader just what the good (or bad?) guys are up to, when we figure out just what crime it is they are in process of committing, it's just laughable. It's such a Keystone Caper load of garbage that one finds it hard to continue and see the book to completion. And just when you think you'll have the pleasure of finding out the end results of their "crime", Gibson decides that is something best left to reverberate through "spook country", so we're not privileged with what could be redeeming details. In summary, Spook Country in some ways feels like it's poking fun at spy thriller fans. While it has fleeting glimmers of Ludlum or Clancy, it is a failure in what is proposes to be due to weak and uninteresting lead characters, few plot twists, an almost comical climax, and a vacuum in place of catharsis.