Sure, the book has “characters,” or at least collections of vague personality traits that have been assigned names, although they seldom exhibit consistent human behavior.

The “narrative” is chockablock with incident, but it can’t really be said to add up to a plot, or even much of a story. The plot of Spook Country is not easy to summarize, because the book doesn’t seem to be about much of anything but ideas, especially the central conceit that in the post 9-11 world everything is subservient to the process of intelligence gathering. This is another of the big ideas in Spook Country, and while it’s a pretty obvious observation, it’s an important one, too, and it’s nice Gibson acknowledges it. The digital world has, instead, entered us, via our electronic tools, so that reality itself has become virtual. We may not be entering into the digital landscape of our computers, as Gibson and others imagined back around 1986, by plugging into virtual reality via electronic visors or data ports implanted into our necks. Gibson remains good with ideas, which, after all, is the hallmark of science fiction. That’s only one of the Big Ideas in Spook Country. Like his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, with which Spook Country shares some characters and themes, the new one is set in the present day. Let me quickly add, though, the man is not stupid. Why read sci-fi when you can log onto YouTube at your local Starbucks, via wireless Internet, and watch the future swallowing us up in real time?Īlas, these developments serve not only to demonstrate Gibson’s perspicacity as an idea man, but also to expose his shortcomings as a novelist. Indeed, we’re so wired the world we live in has become indistinguishable from science fiction, thereby rendering obsolete the kind of near-future sci-fi favored by Gibson.

We all have personal computers now - not to mention iPods, and Blackberries, and Bluetooth. Events in the real world have overtaken those in his novels. William Gibson, possibly the most influential science-fiction writer of the past 30 years, seems to have missed class that day, if his ninth novel, Spook Country, is any indication.Īs the leading founder of “cyberpunk,” the 1980s subgenre that was the first to imagine the enormous changes in human life soon to be wrought by the onrushing digital age, Gibson finds himself in the same fix that stymied spymaster John LeCarre after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Novel Writing 101, surely, includes the injunction that if you have only one narrative voice, then you might consider steering away from multiple points of view.

Spook country by william gibson