“Secrets,” says Blue Ant CEO Hubertus Bigend, “are the very root of cool.”

It’s been over thirteen years since I last read Neuromancer. Long enough to be left with but a vague sense of Gibson’s genius for wordsmithing. Long enough for the future he predicted to largely have become our present. It seems that since the world has caught up to Gibson’s vision of the future, he feels no need to extrapolate any further. Like his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country is set in the here and the now. Maybe it’s not yours or mine, but it is out there, somewhere.

Milgrim is a high-end junkie, one who would likely be dead if it wasn’t for Agent Brown. Brown claims to be looking for The Old Man, doing the work of the government. But which one? Tito is a young Cuban immigrant. A trafficker in iPods, and a devotee of something known as “systema". What is on these iPods that Agent Brown is so interested in? Hollis Henry, former lead singer for cult band The Curfew, now a freelance writer for startup magazine The Node, a magazine that may or may not exist. A magazine that is interested in a new fad called “Locative Art”.

In “Locative Art” Gibson has created one of his strongest metaphors for reality. It is an art form that exists only digitally. Carefully rendered images or scenes projected into our world with wireless technology. Invisible to the masses, but if you possess the right equipment you can see where programmers have tagged our reality. See River Phoenix lie outside the Viper Room, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack, or a shrine to Helmut Newton at the site of his fatal crash. When the technology becomes readily available for everyone to see these tags, do they not become real?

Gibson skillfully weaves the disparate protagonists together as post-terror paranoia becomes a character in its own right, rolling Spook Country towards its climax. Do the good guys win? Are they even the good guys? A secret only William Gibson knows, and that is very cool.

Previously:

William Gibson's Official Website

Gibson To Take Second Life Plunge

2 Cyberpunk Links in One Morning

William Gibson Virtual Reading "Sells Out"

William Gibson in Boston Globe