Trumped by
technology

>> In Spook Country William Gibson ditches
the past and future for the here and now

by Juliet Waters

Just as I started reading William Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country, Madeleine L’Engle died. Though she was best known for her classic, A Wrinkle In Time, L’Engle had a writing career that extended beyond science fiction. The same has been said recently of Gibson. Though he’s best known as the visionary who coined the term “cyberspace” in the last decade, Gibson has been setting his novels in the recent past.

In the recent past, however, thousands of people lined up Pavlovian-style for a $600 phone that was slashed down to $400 less than two months later. So an argument could be made that science fiction no longer actually has to be set in the future. “Intelligence,” states one character in Spook Country, “is advertising turned inside out.” This pseudo-profound truth comes out of the mouth of Hubertus Bigend, whose Wikipedia entry describes him as the “founder of the innovative global advertising agency Blue Ant.” (Just so you know, Wikipedia already has an entry about Bigend’s fake Wikipedia entry.) I’d argue that this is also a fair description of Spook Country. It has its obvious pleasures, but too often it reads less like fiction than advertising turned inside out.

It feels that way from the opening chapters where we meet Hollis Henry, ex-member of a reasonably famous goth-garage band the Curfew. Hollis is now a freelance journalist currently on assignment for a magazine she’s never heard of.

From what she understands, Node aspires to be the European version of Wired. And since they’re putting her up in the Mondrian hotel, she’s not about to ask too many questions. Hollis takes in the hyper-stylized world around her with the normal amount of passive-aggressive appreciation you’d expect from an ex-minor rockstar who isn’t quite sure where her next per diem is coming from. Her assignment is an article on locative art, a high-tech mutation of performance art and video installation. Virtual reality goggles and satellite technology are used to superimpose holographic images onto actual street corners. Hollis finds it an interesting, if “witheringly geeky art trend,” but she’s also finding herself increasingly uneasy about the shadiness that surrounds Node, a shadiness that doesn’t show any sign of dissipation when she meets her publisher, Bigend.

In the world of Spook Country, Bigend represents an almost contemporary version of IT, the soulless machine that runs the alternate reality that L’Engle created for her dystopic planet. Bigend is not a machine, but he’s so mindlessly driven by adoration for technology that he might as well be. We’re not sure, but Bigend may have something to do with the plotlines of several other characters who don’t have an obvious relationship until the end of the novel. There’s Milgrim, an Atavan junkie who has been kidnapped for reasons that will remain unclear for a very long time. And there’s Tito, son of a family of Cuban-Chinese spies adept in free running and Santerian versions of Russian martial arts.

Spook Country has the feel of a relatively laconic version of 24, where terrorists, or merely self-styled art jokesters, greedy industrialists, or too many unemployed CIA agents, may threaten the world. It’s a world impressively designed by Gibson, a prose stylist who can’t let breakfast go by without an exacting description of how the eggs were cooked (in one chapter they are “poached with a whisk,” in the next they are scrambled in water instead of butter).

Gibson is clearly not a technology fanboy like Bigend. But in the end, in this world, the only thing that can trump technology is technology. Gibson recently stated in an interview that technology is the only thing driving change on our planet. If you’re happy believing that, you’ll have an easy time enjoying Spook Country. If you’re still holding out for novels like L’Engle’s, where humanity actually plays a significant part in bringing about change, then you’ll find it a little harder.

Spook Country by William Gibson,
Putnam, HC, 384PP, $32.50