Spook Country (Blue Ant Series #2)

by William Gibson

Overview

The “cool and scary”(San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer.

spook (spo͞ok) n.: A specter; a ghost. Slang for “intelligence agent.”
 
country (ˈkən-trē) n.: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind.
 
spook country (spo͞ok ˈkən-trē) n.: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place we are learning to live.
 
Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him...

“A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.”—The Washington Post Book World

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425221419
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/03/2008
Series:	Blue Ant Series , #2
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is also the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife.

Hometown:

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Date of Birth:

March 17, 1948

Place of Birth:

Conway, South Carolina

Education:

B.A., University of British Columbia, 1977

Editorial Reviews

A puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes.”—Los Angeles Times

“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.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Gibson excels at pinpointing the hidden forces that shape our world.”—Details
 
“[A] dazed, mournful quality…[An] evocation of post-9/11 displacement, the sense of a world in which nothing seems fixed or reassuring…one of our vital novelists.”—Newsday
 
“Although wearing the trappings of a thriller, Spook Country is essentially a comedy, albeit a dry, dark, and disturbing one.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A fitful, fast-forward spy tale...It’s to Gibson’s credit that he weaves his strands of disparate narrators, protagonists and foils, and his panoply of far-forward technology, into a vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale.”—USA Today

“Part thriller, part spy novel, part speculative fiction, Gibson’s provocative work is like nothing you have ever read before.”—Library Journal
 
“Set in the same high-tech present day as Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s fine ninth novel offers startling insights into our paranoid and often fragmented postmodern world....Compelling characters and crisp action sequences, plus the author’s trademark metaphoric language, help make this one of Gibson’s best.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Gibson excels as usual in creating an off-kilter atmosphere of vague menace.”—Kirkus Reviews
 

From the Publisher

Despite a full complement of thieves, pushers and pirates, Spook Country is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best work of Don DeLillo. Although he is a very different sort of writer, Gibson, like DeLillo, writes fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture. Spook Country—which is a beautifully multi-leveled title—takes an unflinching look at that culture. With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things." In Spook Country, Gibson takes another large step forward and reaffirms his position as one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present.
—The Washington Post

Bill Sheehan

Gibson takes aim at the BlackBerry era with the excellent Spook Country.

Men's Health

A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.

Washington Post Book World

Never anything less than fascinating.

Columbus Dispatch

Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Gibson excels at pinpointing the hidden forces that shape our world.

Details

Both cool and scary.

San Francisco Chronicle

[His] complex and riveting new novel, Spook Country, is both entertaining and visionary, solidifying his position as the twenty-first century's primary literary soothsayer.

Vancouver Sun

A fitful, fast-forward spy tale.

USA Today

A delicious surge of pleasure-center prose.

Los Angeles Times

Gibson's work is all edge and chill and incipient panic...His worlds are so striking, so plausible, that you're just happy to be along for the ride.

Chicago Tribune

The author himself is enthusiastically working his way back from the future.

Entertainment Weekly

The SF innovator follows up his mainstream success (Pattern Recognition, 2003) with another novel set in the near-present, as three separate groups chase after a mysterious freight container. Hollis Henry, erstwhile singer for a disbanded rock group, the Curfew, is now a freelance journalist with a baffling assignment from Node, a startup magazine that is remarkably averse to publicity. She's researching "locative" art in Los Angeles, though her employer seems mostly to be interested in the GPS expertise of a guy who facilitates this high-tech virtual- reality genre. Tito belongs to a family of Chinese-Cuban immigrants involved in criminal enterprises in New York, aided by knowledge of Russian gained from a grandfather who worked with Soviet emissaries (and the CIA) in Havana. Milgrim is a drug addict who had the misfortune to be plucked from the streets by Brown, a creepy government operative who keeps him prisoner to take advantage of Milgrim's linguistic skills, needed to decode text messages in a Russian-based artificial language sent among Tito's family members. Gibson excels as usual in creating an off-kilter atmosphere of vague menace: Hollis's wealthy employer and the old man to whom Tito is passing iPods initially seem as sinister as Brown. And the narrative features the author's characteristically shrewd observations about everything from global piracy to conspiracy junkies to cultish rock fans. But the characters are vivid two-dimensional sketches rather than human beings, and the plot turns out to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy about getting back at the idiots and corporate crooks currently raking in the boodle in Iraq. There are some lovely metaphors and sharp insights aseveryone converges on a Canadian port where Tito and his cohorts will do something to the container before Brown and his cohorts can get hold of it. But when the mists of mystification clear, what's revealed isn't very interesting. Readable and mildly engaging, but not the kind of cutting-edge work we expect from Gibson.

Kirkus Reviews

SPOOK COUNTRY is a complex, demanding novel. Narrator Robertson Dean has a solid delivery for this challenging story about spies, a mysterious inventor, and a new form of art that uses light as sculpture that can be seen only through a special visor. Dean’s command of numerous accents makes his performance, and the novel itself, believable. Fans of Gibson’s previous work, PATTERN RECOGNITION, will find his latest appealing. Newcomers may be put off by the apparent disconnectedness in the beginning of the book. But stick with it—in the end everything makes sense, and all the disparate pieces come together. Be warned, this is not a novel to half-listen to while distracted. M.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

DEC 07/JAN 08 - AudioFile