Ghost World

Cyberspace: Ever hear of it? Gibson coined the term.

by Evan Young

If Spook Country doesn't prove William Gibson's extraordinarily sharp sense of our current technological age for you, then you may as well spend your days surfing cyberspace. (Cyberspace: Ever hear of it? Gibson coined the term.)

The story — a sequel of sorts to 2003's Pattern Recognition — follows a handful of different people separately. First is Hollis Henry, who has been contracted by European geek-tech magazine Node to do a story about a new piece of technologically advanced artistic hardware. Next there's Tito, a young Russian-fluent Cuban from a family with a rich history in espionage; Brown (an agency man) and Milgrim (a high-end drug addict), who are shadowing Tito; and Bobby Chombo, a paranoid programmer who refuses to sleep in the same space twice. To say how these characters come together, if at all, would be giving things away; adherent to its title, though, the book does provide furtive newspaper-wrapped iPod handoffs to old men in public parks, Volapuk-coded text-message interceptions, salt-cartridged Bulgarian handguns and giant videographic squids.

Gibson clearly understands the technological reality of the present. In the real world, one could say that people are losing their accents among the mystery and jumble of what is now a widespread tech vocabulary: Web 2.0, user-generated content, iPod. Gibson gets this phenomenon, and in the book's carefully crafted world of spatially tagged hypermedia, animated ghosts and intelligence spooks, unwinding technological mysteries becomes, as is noted, the root of cool.

In short, this may be Gibson's most widely accessible book to date, and you need to read it. If you're not a science fiction reader, it shouldn't matter. Spook Country is sci-fi the way Verne's giant submarine is today's mod_perl. Meaning, Gibson is our current leading author in a genre of a different kind, something like "technofutural fiction," and Spook Country becomes a must-read as it further defines this genre.

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Spook Country

By William Gibson
Penguin Group Books
$25.95, 384 pp.

William Gibson reads Thu., Aug. 16, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.