Spook Country

The popular cyberpunk author gives up science fiction, opting instead for a speculative near now.
Twenty-five years after he coined the term “cyberspace,” the world has finally caught up with William Gibson. Science fiction has become speculative fiction, and Spook Country takes place in a perfectly plausible near now. In terse but propulsive chapters, Gibson creates characters so three-dimensional they can practically be seen with eyes closed.

Like its predecessor, the best-seller Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s new novel follows a young woman on a quest. Hollis Henry, a former member of cult band Curfew trying to make a go of it as a freelance journalist, accepts an assignment from Node to write about locative computing and the arts. No one seems to have heard of the magazine, but they have heard of its publisher, Recognition’s sinister Humbertus Bigend. His real interest is not art, it’s programmer (and Curfew fan) Bobby Chombo, who sees the world in terms of GPS gridlines, never sleeps in the same square twice and may know the location of a mysterious shipping container.

Hollis’s story alternates and ultimately intersects with that of Milgrim, a high-functioning junkie kidnapped by a not-quite-government agent to translate the coded Russian dialect spoken by a family of Cuban-Chinese spies. Thanks to their Communist-era analog “systema,” these ghosts in the machine make themselves invisible to our digital surveillance culture even as they transport sensitive information stored on… iPods. Of course.