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Tuesday, September 16, 2008


Spook Country by William Gibson

I really like William Gibson, so I really liked this novel. It takes the same fictional-high-ground that Pattern Recognition did, which is to say, it embraces the post-Neuromancer future as the present and writes sci-fi sounding modern day fiction.

Our characters are the same international hipsters, cool hunters, artistes and mercs of other Gibson novels. The language is similar, though slightly plainer in many cases. But it’s still a treat to read his descriptions of places you’ve been.

In this case, since Gibson is a bit lazy and sets the novel mostly in the two cities he likely knows best, Los Angeles and Vancouver, I happen to be VERY familiar with the locations he’s describing, which is fun. In particular, the novel’s conclusion, amid the blue and orange shipping containers on the Vancouver harbor dockyard is a view that I see out both my office and my hotel window about 100 days a year. And since I’m fascinated with the spaceport looking place I can appreciate his fascination with the same.

A fun, fast novel. It doesn’t cover any new ground, and the inclusion of weird deities hearkens back to the Loas I liked the least in Count Zero. But it’s still cool fiction, and it’s cool that our world is now largely Gibson’s future from twenty years ago.

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