Spook Country (2007) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Milgrim: high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs
• Brown: The mystery man
• Bobby Chombo: a "producer"
• Hollis Henry: journalist, on investigative assignment from a magazine called Node. Former musician in the cult indie band the Curfew
• Tito: His family came from Cuba. He speaks Russian.
• Alberto: Los Angeles locative artist
• Odile Richard: curator specialising in the field of locative art
• Hubertus Bigend: amoral marketing guru

Quotes edit see section history

• “A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.”

  Milgrim

• “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is? ... If you are, you let the terrorists win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why you call him 'terrorist.' He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.”

  Milgrim

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• “A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.”

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• “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?”

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• Inchmale thought that America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11.

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• “It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”

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• “Secrets,” said the Bigend beside her, “are the very root of cool.”

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• “Because the celebrity self is a sort of tulpa,” he said. “A what?” “A projected thought-form. A term from Tibetan mysticism. The celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under the right circumstances, indefinitely survive the death of its subject. That’s what every Elvis sighting is about, literally.”

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• Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

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• “Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.” “Which means?” “Secrets,” said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, “are cool.”

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• Cities, in Milgrim’s experience, had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning. There was a sort of basic fuckedness index to be read, then, in faces that hadn’t yet encountered the reality of whatever they were on their way to do.

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• He’d once dated a woman who liked to say that the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.

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First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Eversion of cyberspace: Through its treatment of locative technology, the novel revisits notions of virtual reality and cyberspace prominent in Gibson's early cyberpunk fiction. One character proposes that cyberspace is everting; becoming an integral and indistinguishable element of the physical world rather than a domain to be visited. During the book tour for the novel, Gibson elaborated on this theme, proposing that the ubiquity of connectivity meant that what had been called "cyberspace" is no longer a discrete sphere of activity separate from and secondary to normal human activity, but that those increasingly less common parts of normal life free from connectivity were the exception. "If the book has a point to make where we are now with cyberspace", he commented, it was that cyberspace "has colonized our everyday life and continues to colonize everyday life."(from Wikipedia)
• Class divide: One of the elements of the novel that the author found most poignant was that of class division and how there is a subset of people who have access to a world of power and wealth that the vast majority will never experience, of which Gibson cited Brown and his evidently routine use of a private jet as an example. The author felt that at the time of writing, such social chasms were widening, and drew parallels to the Victorian era as well as to the world of his breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984) in which there is no middle class, only the super-rich and a predominantly criminal underclass.It's a very Victorian world, and when I was writing Spook Country I kept running up against that feeling that the world I'm actually trying to predict is becoming more Victorian, not less. Less middle class, more like Mexico, more like Mexico City. And I think that's probably not a good direction.—William Gibson, in interview with Amazon.comIn an interview with The Telegraph promoting the novel, Gibson conjectured that the world was moving to a situation wherein social status is determined by "connectivity" – access to communications technology – rather than material wealth.(from Wikipedia)
• Political climate of the post-9/11 world: Another theme retained from the novel's predecessor is the exploration of the change in American society in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Gibson interpreted the attacks as a nodal point which irrevocably changed the course of history:In some ways September 11 was the true beginning of the 21st century <and> at this point it is still perhaps only our narrative. But the way we have responded to it is changing things for other people in the world, too. So it is now becoming part of their narratives and their narratives will have different versions of the cause and its effects of the event. So it is like this seismic shock, one whose waves are still moving up the time line. At its epicentre is 9/11.—William Gibson, in interview with the Brisbane Times, September 7, 2007Although he had avoided political themes in his previous work out of a distaste for didacticism, Gibson found that in the Bush era, politics had "jacked itself up to my level of weirdness".<18> Politics is present as an underlying theme in Spook Country to a greater extent than in any of the author's previous novels. The novel is in part an exploration of the fear, uncertainty and pervasive paranoia of an America riven by the unending and divisive Iraq War. Of the climate in Washington, D.C. during that period, he remarked in a 2007 interview that "I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That's what makes it work. It's interesting."Nathan Lee in The Village Voice advanced the notion that while Pattern Recognition focused to an extent on "specifying the ambient sense of invasiveness in all aspects of life after the collapse of the towers", Spook Country accepted that anxiety as a premise, and was thus "the more reflective, less unnerving of the two novels". In a review for Scotland on Sunday, Mike Duffy called the novel "a startling, effective guidebook to post-9/11 America"; Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times elaborated, proposing that it was "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".(from Wikipedia)

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Pattern Recognition, and followed by Zero History.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. William Gibson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Locus Science Fiction Award (Finalist, 2008)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: 2007003138
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Politics and other themes make this an adult read.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Authors, A-Z › ( G ) › Gibson, William
• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction › High Tech

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