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Spook Country by William Gibson List Price: $25.95 Price: $2.34 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. You Save: $23.61 (90%)

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:
Smooth as Ceramic, Thin as a Microchip	Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
A slick casing of ultra-modern style hold a wafer-thin plot in William Gibson's "Spook Country". Mr Gibson returns to the augmented-reality world of 2003's "Pattern Recognition" and uploads us into the minds of Hollis Henry, a freelance journalist working for a magazine that may not even exist, Tito, a Russian-trained Chinese-Cuban smuggler delivering iPods to a mysterious client, and Milgrim, a benzo-addicted Russian translator kidnapped by a pseudo-military team shadowing Tito. Mr Gibson's writing is ceramic-smooth minimalism, slick and stylish as an iPod, and easily its match in self-conscious hipness. Sentences are subject, verb, object, although two of these may be optional. "She'd Google him later" sums up the style--five words or less, including brand name. There is much guff talk about "preubiquitous media" and cyberspace "everting", but the prose is rescued from pretentious silliness by eye-catching imagery, like calling a sidewalk an "abstract in blackened chewing gum". It shouldn't work, but it so often does. It's a powerfully immediate and electrifying style. Sadly, there are some distractions. Mr Gibson outfits his text with more name brands than a Tokyo teenager, and sometimes the triple-lacquer layer of coolness is as numbing as it is hypnotic, like watching computer-generated fractals on endless loop. The real letdown is the plot. There's some silliness involving superman criminals using Russian martial arts and voodoo to outwit Blackwell government types, and the subtext of the novel reads like an unsubtle small-l liberal bible, name-checking such cause celebre as disaffection with the war in Iraq and anguish over the growing divide between haves and have-nots. What's worse, the patently silly denouement in Mr Gibson's hometown of Vancouver robs the story of any gravitas it may have had. It's a pity. Such silken skill with words should be put to use with a more engaging story. That said, Mr Gibson's invigorating Hunter S Thompson-does-sociology approach remains one of the most interesting, original voices in fiction. Let's hope he downloads something meatier for his next oeuvre.
Another Solid Novel from William Gibson	Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
There are few authors whose entire literary output I've read, but William Gibson falls firmly inside that camp. From the ground-breaking Neuromancer, which I originally read when I was a teenager in the early 1990's, through Spook Country, the second Gibson novel set in the "real" world, he has explored the cultural shifts created by technology and has proven more accurate and relevant than almost every other author working in speculative fiction. Now that much of what he imagined has come to pass (either through the world mimicking his work, or merely catching up to it), he's now commenting on the impact of technology. Spook Country follows three characters -- Hollis, the former lead singer of a semi-successful indie rock band, Tito, the young member of a Cuban "boutique" crime family, and Milgrim, an addict who has somehow fallen in with a mysterious intelligence agent called Brown. All are swept up into the search for a cargo container that keeps shuffling around the GPS grid, a search that will eventually lead them to converge in a single place. McGuffins are nothing new to Gibson's novels, used primarily as a vehicle for exploring societal shifts, and the shipping container in Spook Country is no exception. In this case, however, he uses a McGuffin to examine the impact of computer-generated worlds on our own perception of reality, the atemporal nature of celebrity (including an interesting mediation on the trust that people are willing to invest in celebrities, who would otherwise be strangers to them), Iraq war profiteering, Bush-era paranoia and the infusion of pagan religion into contemporary Catholicism. There is a startling array of threads and ideas spun out of Gibson's mystery shipping container, and although the ending is not as satisfying as his past works, the ideas he brings up are definite worth exploring. This may not be Gibson's best book (I'm still partial to Virtual Light), but it's certainly an entertaining and thought-provoking of life in the mid-oughties. Definitely recommended to both old fans and novices alike.
Spook Country	Customer Rating: 2 out of 5
Reading this book is like having a really talented tour guide lead you through the suburbs of Houston - the excellent delivery and style are incapable of covering up the fact that you're not really going anywhere interesting. Easily my least favorite by Gibson.
Brilliant near future speculative fiction	Customer Rating: 5 out of 5
I'm surprised by the luke-warm and negative reviews. This is one of my favorite Gibson books. Made so much more interesting because it is so close to the world we actually live in.
Gibson Irrelevant?	Customer Rating: 2 out of 5
I had high hopes for this novel. Like others, I'm a huge fan of William Gibson. I think he's done a great deal to change the face of the science fiction genre, in fact I think "Neuromancer" turned it on its head. I've read all his novels and short story collections. I wanted to enjoy this book. Unfortunately I came away unmoved and just shrugged my shoulders. As always there are interesting characters and plot points, but the overall story just doesn't go anywhere. Ultimately there is no point. One thing I enjoy about Gibson's novels is that they have wider implications than just what happens to the characters. There's a bigger picture and this picture has something to say about our society now and in the future. I didn't find that here--maybe others did. What I saw was a near future world with three stories running through it that barely connect and don't say anything. So if you like Gibson's writing, enjoy his vision of the future, and don't need a compelling plot line to keep you interested, by all means give this a try. I do believe if you are a hard-core fan you should read this book and prepare to be underwhelmed. But at the end of the day you'll probably enjoy it if your expectations aren't very high. If you're new to Gibson and want to try him out, read his earlier novels or short stories (which I highly recommend). Thanks.