Spook Country

By William Gibson format: trade paperback publication: June 2008 ISBN: 9780425221419

Price $16.50 Quantity This item is in stock and usually ships within 24 hours.

Set in the present, Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2002) addressed hacking, viral marketing, global surveillance, and, several years before YouTube and Lonelygirl15, video on the Internet. Spook Country, too, depicts the present, with the future superimposed on it, a layer of data visible only to those who know how to see it. Hollis Henry, formerly the singer in an early nineties band with a cult following and now a freelance journalist, is hired by Node, a Wired-like publication, to write a piece on "locative art," for which a viewer must don a headset to see three-dimensional virtual renditions projected via wireless to an exact location using GPS. Node's funding comes from Hubertus Bigend (returning from Pattern Recognition), the Belgian founder of the "innovative global advertising agency Blue Ant," known for his "ability to find precisely the right person for a given project." In a positively creepy scene, Hollis, upon learning who is funding her job, does a Google search for Bigend and, just after reading a Wikipedia entry on him, gets a phone call from the man himself. Bigend's intentions may be shady, but he is incredibly resourceful. Hollis goes from L.A. to Vancouver to track geo-hacker Bobby Chombo, himself hired by a mysterious outfit to track a missing shipping container. Other colorful characters with cool toys also pursue the container. Still others pursue the pursuers, in typical Gibsonian fashion.

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