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.

Count Zero by William Gibson

They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in Delhi… begins CZ. From there the tale is off and it’s just the sort of dark dystopian futurism that I admire in William Gibson. No, it doesn’t have the linguistic sizzle of Neuromancer, and by the time it was published, only a few years later, there were already a huge crowd of fast-follower cyberpunk writers.

I’ve read this one before, but it seemed to fit perfectly in the world of dark corporate zaibatsu and elite machine-gun samaurai that I’m thinking about these days. So I read it again.

Still cool. If this kind of action sci-fi is your thing, you’ll probably enjoy this. But, if weird Haitian Voodoo AI turns you off you should probably stay away.

-tf