Spook Country
Encyclopedia
Spook Country is a 2007 novel by speculative fiction
author William Gibson
. A political thriller set in contemporary North America, it followed on from the author's previous novel, Pattern Recognition
(2003), and was succeeded in 2010 by Zero History
, which featured much of its core cast of characters. The plot comprises the intersecting tales of three protagonists: Hollis Henry, a musician-turned-journalist researching a story on locative art
; Tito, a young Cuban-Chinese operative whose family is on occasion in the employ of a renegade ex-CIA agent; and Milgrim, a drug-addled translator held captive by Brown, a strangely authoritarian and secretive man. Themes explored include the ubiquity of locative technology, the eversion of cyberspace and the political climate of the United States in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The critical consensus was that while the plot was underwhelming and the characters unconvincing, the novel was a virtuoso exhibition of Gibson's formidable prose and captured the zeitgeist of post-9/11 American society. Spook Country quickly reached mainstream North American bestseller lists and was nominated for British Science Fiction Association
and Locus Awards.
to write a story for his nascent magazine Node (described as a European Wired
) about the use of locative technology in the art world. Helped by curator Odile Richard she investigates Los Angeles artist Alberto Corrales, who recreates virtually the deaths of celebrities such as River Phoenix
. Corrales leads her to Bobby Chombo, an expert in geospatial technologies who handles Corrales' technical requirements. Chombo's background is troubleshooting navigation systems for the United States military. He is reclusive and paranoid, refusing to sleep in the same GPS grid square on consecutive nights, and only consents to talk to Hollis due to his admiration for The Curfew.
Tito is part of a Chinese Cuban
family of freelance "illegal facilitators", as Brown describes them – forgers, smugglers, and associated support personnel based in New York City – and is assigned by his uncles to hand over a series of iPod
s to a mysterious old man. Tito is adept in a form of systema
that encompasses tradecraft
, a variant of free running
, and the Santería
religion. It is alluded that the old man may have connections to American intelligence circles and Tito hopes he can explain the mysterious death of his father. When the old man calls in a favour, his family dispatches Tito on a dangerous new assignment.
Tracking Tito's family is a man known as Brown, a brusque and obstinate lead covert operative for a shadowy organization of unclear connection to the U.S. government. Of neoconservative
orientation, Brown appears to have a background in law enforcement, but little training in tradecraft. Brown and his team attempt to track the activities of the old man and Tito with the help of Brown's captive Milgrim, whom he has translate the volapuk-encoded
Russian used by Tito's family to communicate. Milgrim is addicted to anti-anxiety drugs, and is kept docile and compliant by Brown, who controls his supply of Rize
. Brown believes that Tito and the old man are in possession of information that would, if revealed, undermine public confidence in the U.S.'s participation in the Iraq War. In his attempts to capture them and their data, however, Brown is instead fed disinformation through the old man's intricate schemes.
The three strands of the novel converge on a shipping container of unspecified cargo that is being transported via a circuitous route to an unknown destination. In Vancouver, the old man's team, with Hollis in tow, irradiate the shipping container, which is revealed to contain millions of U.S. dollars diverted from Iraq reconstruction funds.
in winter, from which the character of Tito emerged. Little of the material in his original pitch of the novel (posted online as part of an early promotional campaign by the book's publishers) survived in the final draft. The original proposal focused on "Warchalker", an obscure Iraqi warblog
which chronicles the story of a disappeared consignment of millions of Iraqi reconstruction money. The readers of the blog included a female networks theorist interested in locative technology, and a Manhattanite of mixed heritage who freelanced with his family for organized crime. The plot would have followed those readers' attempt to track a shipping container through Warchalker on behalf of an unnamed villain.
The characters from the proposal did appear in the final version, albeit in much-altered form. An early draft featuring the musician-turned-journalist Hollis and half-Cuban spy Tito as the two protagonists did not satisfy Gibson, and so he introduced the character of Milgrim, the drug-addled translator. The story of Tito's family of Chinese exiles in Cuba turning to crime was not based on historical events, though their role as "illegal facilitators" was inspired by real crime families specializing in smuggling, a phenomenon Gibson encountered in the course of his work with the futurist consulting entity Global Business Network
. Although he had intended his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition
to be a standalone work, elements of it manifested in the script of its eventual successor, including the character of amoral marketing guru Hubertus Bigend
. As Gibson developed the plot, "it became apparent that Node, the shadowy magazine startup, was way Bigendian", and thus Spook Country came to inhabit the same fictional universe as its predecessor. In a January 2007 interview, the author revealed that the later novel was set in the spring of 2006, and described the shared world of the novels as "more or less the one we live in now".
Gibson was first introduced to locative media
websites through links from a friend, and initially found the phenomenon to be "excessively nerdy and very conceptual". Despite his finding compelling the idea of a digital grid mapping the surface of the earth, Gibson saw little storytelling traction in geocaching
and geohacking, and instead reworked the material into the locative art of the novel. "When I started, I thought that the 'locative art' stuff would work the way immersion technology did in my earlier fiction", he commented in a subsequent interview. "Then I started liking that it wasn’t going to do that." The conception of the artworks in the novel was derived from the lowbrow
art movement, and was inspired by the movement's talismanic Juxtapoz, the only art magazine Gibson was reading regularly at the time. The novel exhibits Gibson's characteristic brand awareness
(a key plot element of Pattern Recognition), which he honed while poring over catalogues of products as part of his writing process. The author found the writing process unnerving, as the solution to the mystery of the container – the novel's MacGuffin
– did not come to him until after he had written several hundred pages of manuscript.
. In August 2007, Gibson made an appearance in the virtual world Second Life
to give a reading of the novel; later reflecting on the experience, he remarked that the Second Life construct was "a lot more corporate" than he had imagined. A report in The Times described the event as "heavily freighted with meaning" in light of Gibson's role in shaping conceptions of cyberspace and virtual worlds.
In an interview to promote the release of the novel, Gibson revealed that one of the issues that had most affected his writing process since Pattern Recognition was the sense that everything in the text was potentially searchable online. "It's as though there is a sort of invisible hyperlink theoretical text that extends out of the narrative of my novel in every direction", he commented. A recipient of an advanced reading copy
initiated Node Magazine
, a literary project in the guise of the novel's fictional magazine, with the intent of annotating the novel. The author, under the nom de plume patternBoy, mobilised a cadre of volunteers to track the references and collate the cloud of data
surrounding the work – those elements of the story with footprints on internet resources such as Google and Wikipedia. The project had precedent in Joe Clark's PR-Otaku, an attempt at logging and annotating Pattern Recognition, but whereas that took several years to develop, Node was complete before the novel was even published.
, war profiteering and esoteric martial artistry
, as well as familiar themes from the author's previous novels such as the unintended uses for which technology is employed (e.g. locative art
) and the nature of celebrity
. The author's preoccupation with semiotics and apophenia
in Pattern Recognition
is carried over in the sequel. In a review for The Guardian, Steven Poole
observed that "This is a novel about, and also full of, ghost-signs, or signs that may not be signs, and about the difficulty of telling the difference. Gibson delights in saturating the pages with data that may or may not encode clues for the reader."
and cyberspace
prominent in Gibson's early cyberpunk
fiction. One character proposes that cyberspace is everting; becoming an integral and indistinguishable element of the physical world rather than a domain to be visited. During the book tour for the novel, Gibson elaborated on this theme, proposing that the ubiquity of connectivity meant that what had been called "cyberspace" is no longer a discrete sphere of activity separate from and secondary to normal human activity, but that those increasingly less common parts of normal life free from connectivity were the exception. "If the book has a point to make where we are now with cyberspace", he commented, it was that cyberspace "has colonized our everyday life and continues to colonize everyday life."
and how there is a subset of people who have access to a world of power and wealth that the vast majority will never experience, of which Gibson cited Brown and his evidently routine use of a private jet as an example. The author felt that at the time of writing, such social chasms were widening, and drew parallels to the Victorian era
as well as to the world of his breakthrough novel Neuromancer
(1984) in which there is no middle class, only the super-rich and a predominantly criminal underclass.
In an interview with The Telegraph promoting the novel, Gibson conjectured that the world was moving to a situation wherein social status is determined by "connectivity" – access to communications technology – rather than material wealth.
and the "infantilization of society", first appeared as a prominent motif in Gibson's thought with Pattern Recognition. Gibson interpreted the attacks as a nodal point, "an experience out of culture" which irrevocably changed the course of history and marked "the true beginning of the 21st century." After crafting 100 pages of that novel, he was compelled to re-write the main character's backstory, which the attacks had suddenly rendered implausible; this he called "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction." The result saw Gibson noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform their writing. Nathan Lee in The Village Voice
advanced the notion that while Pattern Recognition focused to an extent on "specifying the ambient sense of invasiveness in all aspects of life after the collapse of the towers", Spook Country accepted that anxiety as a premise, and was thus "the more reflective, less unnerving of the two novels".
Politics is present as an underlying theme in Spook Country to a greater extent than in any of the author's previous novels. The novel can be read as an exploration of the fear, uncertainty and pervasive paranoia of an America riven by the unending and divisive Iraq War. Although he had avoided overtly political themes in his previous work out of a distaste for didacticism
, Gibson found that in the Bush era, politics had "jacked itself up to my level of weirdness". Of the climate in Washington, D.C.
during that period, he disclosed in a 2007 interview that "I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That's what makes it work. It's interesting." Mike Duffy in Scotland on Sunday
characterized the novel as a "startling, effective guidebook to post-9/11 America"; Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times elaborated, proposing that it was "arguably the first example of the post-post-9/11 novel, whose characters are tired of being pushed around by forces larger than they are – bureaucracy, history and, always, technology – and are at long last ready to start pushing back".
s hardcover fiction bestseller list for the U.S, as well as on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction (where it lasted three weeks). It earned a nomination for the BSFA Awards
for best novel of 2007, and finished second to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union
in the standings for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
the following year. In August 2008, Rebecca Armstrong of The Independent
named Spook Country as one of the "Ten Best Thrillers".
Mike Duffy felt that although the novel was less overtly science fiction
than Gibson's earlier novels, it retained their "wit, virtuosity and insights", and had "the same giddy mix of techno-fetishism, nuanced edge and phraseological finesse which enlivened his previous work". "Spook Country, in essence," pronounced The Telegraphs Tim Martin, "is a classic paranoid quest narrative, but one that refashions the morbid surveillance tropes of the Cold War for a post-Iraq era". Ken Barnes of USA Today found that "[l]andscapes, events and points of view shift constantly, so that the reader never truly feels on solid ground", but judged the novel to be a "vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale". In a review for The Washington Post
, Bill Sheahan hailed the novel's capture of the zeitgeist, and compared it to the acclaimed literary fiction of Don DeLillo
:
hailed the novel as a "puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes", noting the fact that antihero Hubertus Bigend
was the most prominent link to Pattern Recognition as "deliciously sinister". Tim Martin thought that the plot lacked direction at times. Although he conceded that the novel's main Henry/Bigend storyline felt lightweight, Matt Thorne
writing in The Independent
conjectured that it was part of Gibson's conscious design that that thread "plays out against a backdrop of hidden machinations that have a much darker, wider resonance". Thorne declared Spook Country a more substantial novel than its predecessor on this basis. John Casimir of The Sydney Morning Herald
concurred, writing that despite the similarity in the plots of the novels, the narrative foundation of the later novel was firmer, its structure "more sophisticated" and its "seams less visible".
Ed Park singled out the author's prose for praise, proclaiming that "[s]entence for sentence, few authors equal Gibson's gift for the terse yet poetic description, the quotable simile – people and products are nailed down with a beautiful precision approximating the platonic ideal of the catalog". Matt Thorne noted that while he found Gibson's tendency towards hyper-specificity initially irritating, "there's hypnotic quality to the relentless cataloguing". The author's prose was also extolled by Clay Evans of the Daily Camera, and by Benjamin Lytal in The New York Sun, who declared that "the real news, in Spook Country, is that much of the flair that Mr. Gibson once brought to descriptions of cyberspace seems to fit perfectly, now, on all kinds of things." In The Seattle Times, Nisi Shawl gushed that "[e]ven without the high cool quotient of the novel's contents", the enjoyment of the its prose would be sufficient to attract most readers to immerse themselves in the book. Simon Cooper of The Book Show
agreed with the commendations of Gibson's prose, but felt the plot and characterization left the book down:
In a review for The Providence Journal
, Andy Smith remarked that the author was "a master of atmosphere, if not character" – a sentiment echoed by The Post and Courier
s Dan Conover, who although praising the novel's intelligence and contemporary relevance, felt that Gibson's underlying political pre-occupation and detached narration came at the expense of character development. Neil Drumming of Entertainment Weekly in awarding the novel a "B" rating concurred, complaining that the protagonists "often just feel like higher-tech automatons with useful features" whose actions are the product of manipulation by "external forces and cagey operatives" rather than conscious decisions. In The Daily Telegraph, Roger Perkins was more blunt, remarking that the "relentless pace and breathless dislocation" of the plot hid "character development that's as deep as dental veneer but equally shiny". Matt Thorne summed up the issue in opining that "The problem with a thriller which begins with a technology journalist talking to an experimental artist is that, no matter how exciting the events later become, it's hard to care."
reviewer Michael Berry called it "an ingenious reversal" which proved that despite its apparent cynicism, the novel was "oddly optimistic for a ghost story". Overall, Thorne judged the novel ultimately unsatisfactory on account of the underwhelming ending and because Gibson "hides the full complications of the plot so successfully that it feels as if everything important is happening offstage". Roger Perkins judged the novel to be "a triumph of style over substance – which is exactly the way you suspect that Gibson wants it." His colleague Martin mused that along with the regular Gibsonian tropes, there was "something new ... a dark and very contemporary surge of suspicion and bad faith" in the novel which suggested that the author might be approaching the apex of his writing. Dan Conover concluded that while the "darkly comic satire" was "a worthy addition to the Gibson canon and a significant cultural artifact", it would not rank among the author's best works.
Speculative fiction
Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as...
author William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
. A political thriller set in contemporary North America, it followed on from the author's previous novel, Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition (novel)
Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols...
(2003), and was succeeded in 2010 by Zero History
Zero History
Zero History is a novel by William Gibson. It concludes the informal trilogy begun by Pattern Recognition and features Hollis Henry and Milgrim from Spook Country, the middle book, as the protagonists.-Plot:...
, which featured much of its core cast of characters. The plot comprises the intersecting tales of three protagonists: Hollis Henry, a musician-turned-journalist researching a story on locative art
Locative media
Locative media or Location-based media are media of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media however is not bound to the same location to which the content refers....
; Tito, a young Cuban-Chinese operative whose family is on occasion in the employ of a renegade ex-CIA agent; and Milgrim, a drug-addled translator held captive by Brown, a strangely authoritarian and secretive man. Themes explored include the ubiquity of locative technology, the eversion of cyberspace and the political climate of the United States in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The critical consensus was that while the plot was underwhelming and the characters unconvincing, the novel was a virtuoso exhibition of Gibson's formidable prose and captured the zeitgeist of post-9/11 American society. Spook Country quickly reached mainstream North American bestseller lists and was nominated for British Science Fiction Association
BSFA Awards
The BSFA Awards are literary awards presented annually since 1970 by the British Science Fiction Association to honor works in the genre of science fiction. Nominees and winners are chosen based on a vote of BSFA members...
and Locus Awards.
Plot summary
The first strand of the novel follows Hollis Henry, a former member of the early 1990s cult band The Curfew and a freelance journalist. She is hired by advertising mogul Hubertus BigendHubertus Bigend
Hubertus Bigend is a fictional character appearing in the later novels of science fiction and literary author William Gibson. Bigend is the antihero of Gibson's Pattern Recognition , Spook Country and Zero History...
to write a story for his nascent magazine Node (described as a European Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
) about the use of locative technology in the art world. Helped by curator Odile Richard she investigates Los Angeles artist Alberto Corrales, who recreates virtually the deaths of celebrities such as River Phoenix
River Phoenix
River Jude Phoenix was an American film actor, musician, and teen icon. He was the oldest brother of fellow actors Rain, Joaquin, Liberty, and Summer Phoenix.Phoenix began acting at age 10 in television commercials...
. Corrales leads her to Bobby Chombo, an expert in geospatial technologies who handles Corrales' technical requirements. Chombo's background is troubleshooting navigation systems for the United States military. He is reclusive and paranoid, refusing to sleep in the same GPS grid square on consecutive nights, and only consents to talk to Hollis due to his admiration for The Curfew.
Tito is part of a Chinese Cuban
Chinese Cuban
A Chinese Cuban is a Cuban of Chinese ancestry who was born in or has immigrated to Cuba. They are part of the ethnic Chinese diaspora .-History:...
family of freelance "illegal facilitators", as Brown describes them – forgers, smugglers, and associated support personnel based in New York City – and is assigned by his uncles to hand over a series of iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
s to a mysterious old man. Tito is adept in a form of systema
Systema
Systema is a Russian martial art. Training includes: hand to hand combat, grappling, knife fighting and fire arms training as well. Training involves drills and sparring without set kata. It focuses mainly on controlling the six body levers through pressure point application, striking and weapon...
that encompasses tradecraft
Tradecraft
Tradecraft is a general term that denotes a skill acquired through experience in a trade.The term is also used within the intelligence community as a collective word for the techniques used in modern espionage...
, a variant of free running
Free running
Freerunning is a form of urban acrobatics in which participants, known as freerunners , use the city and rural landscape to perform movements through its structures...
, and the Santería
Santería
Santería is a syncretic religion of West African and Caribbean origin influenced by Roman Catholic Christianity, also known as Regla de Ocha, La Regla Lucumi, or Lukumi. Its liturgical language, a dialect of Yoruba, is also known as Lucumi....
religion. It is alluded that the old man may have connections to American intelligence circles and Tito hopes he can explain the mysterious death of his father. When the old man calls in a favour, his family dispatches Tito on a dangerous new assignment.
Tracking Tito's family is a man known as Brown, a brusque and obstinate lead covert operative for a shadowy organization of unclear connection to the U.S. government. Of neoconservative
Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism in the United States is a branch of American conservatism. Since 2001, neoconservatism has been associated with democracy promotion, that is with assisting movements for democracy, in some cases by economic sanctions or military action....
orientation, Brown appears to have a background in law enforcement, but little training in tradecraft. Brown and his team attempt to track the activities of the old man and Tito with the help of Brown's captive Milgrim, whom he has translate the volapuk-encoded
Volapuk encoding
Volapuk encoding or latinitsa is a slang term for rendering the letters of the Cyrillic script with Latin ones...
Russian used by Tito's family to communicate. Milgrim is addicted to anti-anxiety drugs, and is kept docile and compliant by Brown, who controls his supply of Rize
Clotiazepam
Clotiazepam is a thienodiazepine drug which is a benzodiazepine analog. The clotiazepam molecule differs from most other benzodiazepines in that the benzene ring has been replaced by a thiophene ring...
. Brown believes that Tito and the old man are in possession of information that would, if revealed, undermine public confidence in the U.S.'s participation in the Iraq War. In his attempts to capture them and their data, however, Brown is instead fed disinformation through the old man's intricate schemes.
The three strands of the novel converge on a shipping container of unspecified cargo that is being transported via a circuitous route to an unknown destination. In Vancouver, the old man's team, with Hollis in tow, irradiate the shipping container, which is revealed to contain millions of U.S. dollars diverted from Iraq reconstruction funds.
Background and composition
Initial conception and development
The writing process for Spook Country began for Gibson with a desire to write a novel, but without any ideas or themes that he wished to explore. The impetus for the story grew out of the author's visual impressions of Lower ManhattanLower Manhattan
Lower Manhattan is the southernmost part of the island of Manhattan, the main island and center of business and government of the City of New York...
in winter, from which the character of Tito emerged. Little of the material in his original pitch of the novel (posted online as part of an early promotional campaign by the book's publishers) survived in the final draft. The original proposal focused on "Warchalker", an obscure Iraqi warblog
Warblog
A warblog or milblog is a weblog devoted mostly or wholly to covering news events concerning an ongoing war. Sometimes the use of the term "warblog" implies that the blog concerned has a pro-war slant. The use of the term "milblog" implies that the author is with the military.-Description and...
which chronicles the story of a disappeared consignment of millions of Iraqi reconstruction money. The readers of the blog included a female networks theorist interested in locative technology, and a Manhattanite of mixed heritage who freelanced with his family for organized crime. The plot would have followed those readers' attempt to track a shipping container through Warchalker on behalf of an unnamed villain.
The characters from the proposal did appear in the final version, albeit in much-altered form. An early draft featuring the musician-turned-journalist Hollis and half-Cuban spy Tito as the two protagonists did not satisfy Gibson, and so he introduced the character of Milgrim, the drug-addled translator. The story of Tito's family of Chinese exiles in Cuba turning to crime was not based on historical events, though their role as "illegal facilitators" was inspired by real crime families specializing in smuggling, a phenomenon Gibson encountered in the course of his work with the futurist consulting entity Global Business Network
Global Business Network
Global Business Network, or GBN, is a strategy consulting firm and member of Monitor Group, that helps businesses, NGOs, and governments use scenario planning to plan for multiple possible futures....
. Although he had intended his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition (novel)
Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols...
to be a standalone work, elements of it manifested in the script of its eventual successor, including the character of amoral marketing guru Hubertus Bigend
Hubertus Bigend
Hubertus Bigend is a fictional character appearing in the later novels of science fiction and literary author William Gibson. Bigend is the antihero of Gibson's Pattern Recognition , Spook Country and Zero History...
. As Gibson developed the plot, "it became apparent that Node, the shadowy magazine startup, was way Bigendian", and thus Spook Country came to inhabit the same fictional universe as its predecessor. In a January 2007 interview, the author revealed that the later novel was set in the spring of 2006, and described the shared world of the novels as "more or less the one we live in now".
Gibson was first introduced to locative media
Locative media
Locative media or Location-based media are media of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media however is not bound to the same location to which the content refers....
websites through links from a friend, and initially found the phenomenon to be "excessively nerdy and very conceptual". Despite his finding compelling the idea of a digital grid mapping the surface of the earth, Gibson saw little storytelling traction in geocaching
Geocaching
Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world....
and geohacking, and instead reworked the material into the locative art of the novel. "When I started, I thought that the 'locative art' stuff would work the way immersion technology did in my earlier fiction", he commented in a subsequent interview. "Then I started liking that it wasn’t going to do that." The conception of the artworks in the novel was derived from the lowbrow
Lowbrow (art movement)
Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. Lowbrow is a widespread populist art movement with origins in the underground comix world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other subcultures. It is also...
art movement, and was inspired by the movement's talismanic Juxtapoz, the only art magazine Gibson was reading regularly at the time. The novel exhibits Gibson's characteristic brand awareness
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is a marketing concept that enables marketers to quantify levels and trends in consumer knowledge and awareness of a brand's existence...
(a key plot element of Pattern Recognition), which he honed while poring over catalogues of products as part of his writing process. The author found the writing process unnerving, as the solution to the mystery of the container – the novel's MacGuffin
MacGuffin
A MacGuffin is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is...
– did not come to him until after he had written several hundred pages of manuscript.
Pre-release
Gibson announced the novel on October 6, 2006 on his blog, where fragments of the work were posted non-sequentially for some time, leading to much reader speculation on the content and plot of the novel. The following day, the blog featured an exploration of the mooted title by close friend and collaborator Jack WomackJack Womack
Jack Womack is an American author of fiction and speculative fiction. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter, and works as a publicity manager for the Orbit and Yen imprints of Hachette Book Group USA....
. In August 2007, Gibson made an appearance in the virtual world Second Life
Second Life
Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...
to give a reading of the novel; later reflecting on the experience, he remarked that the Second Life construct was "a lot more corporate" than he had imagined. A report in The Times described the event as "heavily freighted with meaning" in light of Gibson's role in shaping conceptions of cyberspace and virtual worlds.
In an interview to promote the release of the novel, Gibson revealed that one of the issues that had most affected his writing process since Pattern Recognition was the sense that everything in the text was potentially searchable online. "It's as though there is a sort of invisible hyperlink theoretical text that extends out of the narrative of my novel in every direction", he commented. A recipient of an advanced reading copy
Advance copy
As a marketing tool, publishers provide free copies of new titles to booksellers, journalists and even celebrities.Such books are variously referred to as readers editions, an advance copy, an advance reading copy, ARC or ARE...
initiated Node Magazine
Node Magazine
Node Magazine is a literary project in the guise of a fictional magazine created to annotate the novel Spook Country by William Gibson.The project is essentially a hypertext version of the novel...
, a literary project in the guise of the novel's fictional magazine, with the intent of annotating the novel. The author, under the nom de plume patternBoy, mobilised a cadre of volunteers to track the references and collate the cloud of data
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
surrounding the work – those elements of the story with footprints on internet resources such as Google and Wikipedia. The project had precedent in Joe Clark's PR-Otaku, an attempt at logging and annotating Pattern Recognition, but whereas that took several years to develop, Node was complete before the novel was even published.
Themes
Spook Country explores themes relating to espionageEspionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
, war profiteering and esoteric martial artistry
Martial arts
Martial arts are extensive systems of codified practices and traditions of combat, practiced for a variety of reasons, including self-defense, competition, physical health and fitness, as well as mental and spiritual development....
, as well as familiar themes from the author's previous novels such as the unintended uses for which technology is employed (e.g. locative art
Locative media
Locative media or Location-based media are media of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media however is not bound to the same location to which the content refers....
) and the nature of celebrity
Celebrity
A celebrity, also referred to as a celeb in popular culture, is a person who has a prominent profile and commands a great degree of public fascination and influence in day-to-day media...
. The author's preoccupation with semiotics and apophenia
Apophenia
Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to...
in Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition (novel)
Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols...
is carried over in the sequel. In a review for The Guardian, Steven Poole
Steven Poole
-Biography:Poole studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has subsequently written for publications including The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, and the New Statesman...
observed that "This is a novel about, and also full of, ghost-signs, or signs that may not be signs, and about the difficulty of telling the difference. Gibson delights in saturating the pages with data that may or may not encode clues for the reader."
Eversion of cyberspace
Through its treatment of locative technology, the novel revisits notions of virtual realityVirtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...
and cyberspace
Cyberspace
Cyberspace is the electronic medium of computer networks, in which online communication takes place.The term "cyberspace" was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story "True...
prominent in Gibson's early cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
fiction. One character proposes that cyberspace is everting; becoming an integral and indistinguishable element of the physical world rather than a domain to be visited. During the book tour for the novel, Gibson elaborated on this theme, proposing that the ubiquity of connectivity meant that what had been called "cyberspace" is no longer a discrete sphere of activity separate from and secondary to normal human activity, but that those increasingly less common parts of normal life free from connectivity were the exception. "If the book has a point to make where we are now with cyberspace", he commented, it was that cyberspace "has colonized our everyday life and continues to colonize everyday life."
Class divide
One of the elements of the novel that the author found most poignant was that of class divisionSocial stratification
In sociology the social stratification is a concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions ... a relational set of inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions."...
and how there is a subset of people who have access to a world of power and wealth that the vast majority will never experience, of which Gibson cited Brown and his evidently routine use of a private jet as an example. The author felt that at the time of writing, such social chasms were widening, and drew parallels to the Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
as well as to the world of his breakthrough novel Neuromancer
Neuromancer
Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, a seminal work in the cyberpunk genre and the first winner of the science-fiction "triple crown" — the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy...
(1984) in which there is no middle class, only the super-rich and a predominantly criminal underclass.
In an interview with The Telegraph promoting the novel, Gibson conjectured that the world was moving to a situation wherein social status is determined by "connectivity" – access to communications technology – rather than material wealth.
Political climate of the post-9/11 world
Sociocultural changes in post-September 11 America, including a resurgent tribalismTribalism
The social structure of a tribe can vary greatly from case to case, but, due to the small size of tribes, it is always a relatively simple role structure, with few significant social distinctions between individuals....
and the "infantilization of society", first appeared as a prominent motif in Gibson's thought with Pattern Recognition. Gibson interpreted the attacks as a nodal point, "an experience out of culture" which irrevocably changed the course of history and marked "the true beginning of the 21st century." After crafting 100 pages of that novel, he was compelled to re-write the main character's backstory, which the attacks had suddenly rendered implausible; this he called "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of fiction." The result saw Gibson noted as one of the first novelists to use the attacks to inform their writing. Nathan Lee in The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
advanced the notion that while Pattern Recognition focused to an extent on "specifying the ambient sense of invasiveness in all aspects of life after the collapse of the towers", Spook Country accepted that anxiety as a premise, and was thus "the more reflective, less unnerving of the two novels".
Politics is present as an underlying theme in Spook Country to a greater extent than in any of the author's previous novels. The novel can be read as an exploration of the fear, uncertainty and pervasive paranoia of an America riven by the unending and divisive Iraq War. Although he had avoided overtly political themes in his previous work out of a distaste for didacticism
Didacticism
Didacticism is an artistic philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art. The term has its origin in the Ancient Greek word διδακτικός , "related to education/teaching." Originally, signifying learning in a fascinating and intriguing...
, Gibson found that in the Bush era, politics had "jacked itself up to my level of weirdness". Of the climate in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
during that period, he disclosed in a 2007 interview that "I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That's what makes it work. It's interesting." Mike Duffy in Scotland on Sunday
Scotland on Sunday
Scotland on Sunday is a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published in Edinburgh by The Scotsman Publications Ltd and consequently assuming the role of Sunday sister to its daily stablemate The Scotsman...
characterized the novel as a "startling, effective guidebook to post-9/11 America"; Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times elaborated, proposing that it was "arguably the first example of the post-post-9/11 novel, whose characters are tired of being pushed around by forces larger than they are – bureaucracy, history and, always, technology – and are at long last ready to start pushing back".
Interpretation and reception
Spook Country appeared on bestseller charts by August 7, 2007 – five days after release. The novel entered The Washington Posts hardcover fiction bestseller list for the Washington D.C. area in late August at #4, and by September had reached #2 in San Francisco and Canada. It was listed at #6 on Publishers WeeklyPublishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
s hardcover fiction bestseller list for the U.S, as well as on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction (where it lasted three weeks). It earned a nomination for the BSFA Awards
BSFA Awards
The BSFA Awards are literary awards presented annually since 1970 by the British Science Fiction Association to honor works in the genre of science fiction. Nominees and winners are chosen based on a vote of BSFA members...
for best novel of 2007, and finished second to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in...
in the standings for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Winners of the Locus Award for Best SF Novel, awarded by the Locus magazine. Awards presented in a given year are for works published in the previous calendar year....
the following year. In August 2008, Rebecca Armstrong of The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
named Spook Country as one of the "Ten Best Thrillers".
Mike Duffy felt that although the novel was less overtly science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
than Gibson's earlier novels, it retained their "wit, virtuosity and insights", and had "the same giddy mix of techno-fetishism, nuanced edge and phraseological finesse which enlivened his previous work". "Spook Country, in essence," pronounced The Telegraphs Tim Martin, "is a classic paranoid quest narrative, but one that refashions the morbid surveillance tropes of the Cold War for a post-Iraq era". Ken Barnes of USA Today found that "[l]andscapes, events and points of view shift constantly, so that the reader never truly feels on solid ground", but judged the novel to be a "vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale". In a review for The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, Bill Sheahan hailed the novel's capture of the zeitgeist, and compared it to the acclaimed literary fiction of Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
:
Plot, prose, and character
Ed Park of the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
hailed the novel as a "puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes", noting the fact that antihero Hubertus Bigend
Hubertus Bigend
Hubertus Bigend is a fictional character appearing in the later novels of science fiction and literary author William Gibson. Bigend is the antihero of Gibson's Pattern Recognition , Spook Country and Zero History...
was the most prominent link to Pattern Recognition as "deliciously sinister". Tim Martin thought that the plot lacked direction at times. Although he conceded that the novel's main Henry/Bigend storyline felt lightweight, Matt Thorne
Matt Thorne
Matt Thorne is an English writer born in 1974 who has published seven novels. Thorne grew up in Bristol, England, and was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University. Thorne's first book, Tourist, was published in 1998. The book is an attack on the negative effects of tourism on...
writing in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
conjectured that it was part of Gibson's conscious design that that thread "plays out against a backdrop of hidden machinations that have a much darker, wider resonance". Thorne declared Spook Country a more substantial novel than its predecessor on this basis. John Casimir of The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the SMH is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. The newspaper is published six days a week. The newspaper's Sunday counterpart, The...
concurred, writing that despite the similarity in the plots of the novels, the narrative foundation of the later novel was firmer, its structure "more sophisticated" and its "seams less visible".
Ed Park singled out the author's prose for praise, proclaiming that "[s]entence for sentence, few authors equal Gibson's gift for the terse yet poetic description, the quotable simile – people and products are nailed down with a beautiful precision approximating the platonic ideal of the catalog". Matt Thorne noted that while he found Gibson's tendency towards hyper-specificity initially irritating, "there's hypnotic quality to the relentless cataloguing". The author's prose was also extolled by Clay Evans of the Daily Camera, and by Benjamin Lytal in The New York Sun, who declared that "the real news, in Spook Country, is that much of the flair that Mr. Gibson once brought to descriptions of cyberspace seems to fit perfectly, now, on all kinds of things." In The Seattle Times, Nisi Shawl gushed that "[e]ven without the high cool quotient of the novel's contents", the enjoyment of the its prose would be sufficient to attract most readers to immerse themselves in the book. Simon Cooper of The Book Show
The Book Show
The Book Show is an Australian ABC radio program for the discussion of everything relating to the written word. It is broadcast live around Australia on Radio National with a daily weekday morning show which is then replayed nightly and also has a Sunday evening show. The show is hosted by Ramona...
agreed with the commendations of Gibson's prose, but felt the plot and characterization left the book down:
In a review for The Providence Journal
The Providence Journal
The Providence Journal, nicknamed the ProJo, is a daily newspaper serving the metropolitan area of Providence, Rhode Island and is the largest newspaper in Rhode Island. The newspaper, first published in 1829 and the oldest continuously-published daily newspaper in the United States, was purchased...
, Andy Smith remarked that the author was "a master of atmosphere, if not character" – a sentiment echoed by The Post and Courier
The Post and Courier
Charleston's The Post and Courier is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the South and the eighth oldest newspaper still in publication in the United States. It is published in Charleston, South Carolina. It traces its ancestry to three newspapers, the Charleston Courier, founded in 1803, the...
s Dan Conover, who although praising the novel's intelligence and contemporary relevance, felt that Gibson's underlying political pre-occupation and detached narration came at the expense of character development. Neil Drumming of Entertainment Weekly in awarding the novel a "B" rating concurred, complaining that the protagonists "often just feel like higher-tech automatons with useful features" whose actions are the product of manipulation by "external forces and cagey operatives" rather than conscious decisions. In The Daily Telegraph, Roger Perkins was more blunt, remarking that the "relentless pace and breathless dislocation" of the plot hid "character development that's as deep as dental veneer but equally shiny". Matt Thorne summed up the issue in opining that "The problem with a thriller which begins with a technology journalist talking to an experimental artist is that, no matter how exciting the events later become, it's hard to care."
Conclusion
Reviewers were divided as to the merits of the novel's ending. Andy Smith lamented that the finale of the "mostly intriguing" novel was "distinctly anticlimactic". Tim Martin wrote that it seemed "somehow less than the sum of its parts". Clay Evans dismissed it as "not especially meaningful, but fun", whereas Matt Thorne found it lacking "a traditional thriller's excitement". San Francisco ChronicleSan Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
reviewer Michael Berry called it "an ingenious reversal" which proved that despite its apparent cynicism, the novel was "oddly optimistic for a ghost story". Overall, Thorne judged the novel ultimately unsatisfactory on account of the underwhelming ending and because Gibson "hides the full complications of the plot so successfully that it feels as if everything important is happening offstage". Roger Perkins judged the novel to be "a triumph of style over substance – which is exactly the way you suspect that Gibson wants it." His colleague Martin mused that along with the regular Gibsonian tropes, there was "something new ... a dark and very contemporary surge of suspicion and bad faith" in the novel which suggested that the author might be approaching the apex of his writing. Dan Conover concluded that while the "darkly comic satire" was "a worthy addition to the Gibson canon and a significant cultural artifact", it would not rank among the author's best works.
External links
- Spook Country at WilliamGibsonBooks.com (author's official website)
- Spook Country promotional interview with the author at YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
- "The Art Pack meets William Gibson" – interview with the author with background on the novel at VimeoVimeoVimeo is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. It was founded by Zach Klein and Jake Lodwick in November 2004...
- node.tumblr.com – chapter summaries and background research from Node MagazineNode MagazineNode Magazine is a literary project in the guise of a fictional magazine created to annotate the novel Spook Country by William Gibson.The project is essentially a hypertext version of the novel...
- SpookCountry.co.uk – discussion and analysis of Spook Country from a United Kingdom perspective