A bit of a puzzle, this. Three characters: Tito is a young Cuban, Hollis was a star rock singer, Milgram is an addict Russian translator. They're all chasing a mysterious shipping container. Lots of extravagant whatever... probably the main thing here is just to exhibit how each character has such a different world.

Fun enough book... maybe there is a deeper point to the exercise, but it doesn't leap to mind. ( )

Slow to get started, and with anti-climactic ending, it's not Gibson's best for sure. He can get the adrenaline going and pique your curiosity, and I really enjoyed character Tito's daemon oddities, but somehow the hint of some kind of strange new cyber technology didn't quite live up to expectations or seem to involve more than tracking a shipping container full of money, which itself seemed to be unimportant in the great scheme of things. What were these characters all so worked up about? In the end it was hard to tell, or to care. ( )

I didn't bookmark it at time time, so I can no longer find it. But while reading Spook Country, I ran across a paragraph that just made me stop, savor it, and think to myself, "Now, this is why I read Gibson."
It is a near-certainty that I will re-read this book soon. (Re-reading is a rarity for me.) And I may well raise my rating to 5 stars at that point. Gibson's beautiful prose, quirky characters, and tech-rich plots just delight me. ( )

A neat little caper story. Fun while it lasts but forgettable. ( )

Gibson has a wonderful way with language and there are plenty of ingredients for a great thriller here - but they never really came together. ( )

I'd like to give this book another 1/2 star for style, but GoodReads won't let me.

It took me two tries to get through this book. I made it a little over halfway through the first time before becoming so impatient with the story to 'get on with it' that I set it down and read something else (actually, two somethings: [b:Whiskey Sour|509702|Whiskey Sour (Jack Daniels Mystery, #1)|J.A. Konrath|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1256039094s/509702.jpg|1818591] by J.A. Konrath and Joe Finder's slam bang [b:Vanished|6346436|Vanished|Joseph Finder|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255635445s/6346436.jpg|6532834]). The writing had started out very compelling and rich, but it just didn't seem to be getting anywhere.

When I got back to this book, I was able to pick right up where I left off. I don't know if that's due to the decent characterizations and writing. But it did start working for me, almost in the vein of John LeCarre, but with less plot. I would have almost given the book three stars, except that the whole thing was rather unsatisfying. ( )

To say I didn't understand this book would be a huge understatement. Listening to it didn't provide any clues either. Well...I did like Milgrim, the junkie...he was on drugs for most of the story:) It had absolutely nothing to do with the authors writing skills, the narrator's reading or the story itself...it was simply that I had no idea what anything that was happening was even supposed to mean or relate to anything. That was totally on me...not the author or the book. That being said, I didn't feel it would be fair to the hard work of this author or to his book to give any kind of rating. Those folks born 40 or so years after me will probably understand every word and everything that is happening and be amazed.

Spook Country was not my favorite Gibson novel, but I still love walking through his worlds more than just about any other contemporary writer's. Pattern Recognition was either my second or fourth favorite, after either Neuromancer or the entire cyberspace trilogy. So I'm excited to see how he continues these characters' stories in Zero History. And, yes, I realize that this has become not so much a review of Spook Country as it is a list of reasons why I'm geeked about the NEXT Gibson novel (and the next, and the next, and the next...). ( )

A little bit aimless but the characterization is pretty well done ( )

I love William Gibson. However, I did not love this book. If you haven't read any other William Gibson novels, stay the hell away from this one. Go read Neuromancer, or Pattern
Recognition. Those are shining examples of what Gibson is capable of. Spook Country is not.

Spook country takes three different story lines and works them separately.

You've seen this form before. You know that they are going to somehow influence each other, or come crashing together at
some point.

That's not a new literary device by any stretch. And if an author is going to take it on, it needs to be tight, it needs to be a convergence that the reader cares about, and preferably there is some new twist that hasn't been done before. Gibson does none of these things.

When the three stories do finally converge, it feels more like that magical tangle of knots that even carefully coiled electrical cords devolve into over time. It isn't that tight braid where each thread is essential that i would have expected from Gibson.

I should reiterate. I love William Gibson.
And there are moments in this book where his nearly prophetic imagination shines through.

Gibson has a knack for coming up with these "ideas". They are more than the usual science fiction "what if"s. They are closer to near future foretelling.

If you read Neuromancer for example, you'll find his
passages about Cyberspace to be a pretty accurate description of where we are now, and where we're heading in the near future. And then you'll check the published date and see that it was written in 1984. A time when the internet was just starting to be available on campuses and still being called "gopher"

Spook country has a mysterious shipping container that has never been allowed dock. It changes ships and essentially lives at sea. It's contents and owners are unknown, it is
an orphan, neither being owned, nor recognized by any country or it's laws.

There is the new artform that combines GPS coordinates with a specific internet address. So that you can only see that piece of art if you are both at the correct coordinates,
and have the correct web address. An evolution of geo-caching almost.

And one of my favorites was the concept of training called the Systema.

Gibson explains it just enough to make it work in the book, but leaves the details of the Guerreros a mystery.

"The uncles who taught him systema had themselves been taught by a Vietnamese, a former soldier, one who had come from Paris to end his days in the village of Las Tunas. Tito as a child had sometimes seen this man at rural family functions, but never in Havana, and had nevr spoken with him. The Vietnamese had always worn a loose black cotton shirt with no collar, untucked at the waist, and brown plastic shower sandals scuffed the color of dust in a village street. Tito had seen him, as the older men had sat drinking beer and smoking cigars, ascend a two-story wall of whitewashed concrete blocks, no more purchase afforded than the very shallow grooves of mortar between the courses of blocks. It was a strange memory, since even as a child Tito had taken what he saw to be impossible, in the ordinary sense of the world. No applause from the watching uncles, no sound at all, the blue smoke rising as they puffed their cigars. And the Vietnamese rising like that smoke in the twilight, and as quickly, his limbs not so much moving as insinuating themselves into different and constantly changing relationships with the wall. "

"And while he had learned the uncles’ ways, Juana had taught him the ways of the Guerreros: Eleggua,Ogún, Oshosi and Osun. As Eleggua opens every road, so Ogún clears each road with his machete. God of iron and wars, of labor; owner of every technology. The number seven, colors green and black, and Tito held these inwardly now, as he walked toward Prince Street..."

Like I said, if you haven't read other William Gibson novels, stay the hell away.

If you have read William Gibsons other works... who are we kidding? You're going to buy this no matter what i say. But I would recommend picking up a used paperback copy. ( )

This is the book with which Gibson has finally, definitively fallen behind the curve. Some of his previous books have been bad -- Idoru, anyone? -- and in general, he's been writing the same book over and over, with the same stock characters. But this is the first one in which he no longer seems to understand the zeitgeist.

His stock characters are all social marginals. The Finder of Art -- not an artist, but someone with a mystical ability to track it down. The Rogue Corporate Boss. The Streetwise Muscle. The Tapped-In Insider Exiled. All of them make an appearance in this book, more or less. But the book isn't about social marginality. It's about the evil done by the Bush administration to America. And Gibson has no way of confronting that -- comically, futilely, he has a junkie ventriloquize a lecture, but patently can't go anywhere from there.

No one in the book is really a government employee, working on government time. So Gibson can't confront the fact that the post-9/11 social problems that he depicts have a cause, because he doesn't do governments, he doesn't do personalities. But he can't even really depict what's gone wrong as a structure. Even when he was writing about corporations, he never could bring himself to write an actual one -- they were always rogue individuals, caricatures with more or less unknowable motives, but really nothing like how an actual, impersonal corporate structure operates.

That was fine, back in the days when everyone was dislocated and everyone imagined a face that they could hate. He caught something of that time. But now that there is an actual face -- now that the agenda involves people becoming all too located -- he's lost track. ( )

ollis Henry, ex cantante pop, ahora trabaja de periodista. Una revista poco común llamada Node le encarga a Hollis que localice a Bobby Chombo, un artista multimedia creador de un fascinante artilugio mezcla de GPS y generador de hologramas. El problema es que Bobby también hace algunos trabajos para los militares. Y por eso, nunca duerme dos veces en el mismo lugar. Y no quiere conocer a nadie. Mucho menos a Hollis. Tito, un cubano de raíces chinas, se dedica a delicadas y complejas operaciones de espionaje y transferencia de información. Ahora acaba de recibir una nueva misión, tan peligrosa que tendrá que dejar su casa, empezar una nueva vida en otra parte y posiblemente no volver a ver a su familia nunca más. Milgrim es un adicto a las drogas de diseño. Además, es un gran conocedor del idioma ruso. Milgrim está en manos de Brown, un hombre misterioso que lo tiene secuestrado y lo utiliza para sus propios fines; Milgrim no sabe cuáles son esos fines, pero sospecha que detrás hay intrincadas redes de espionaje militar. William Gibson, el padre del cyberpunk, conecta a todos estos personajes en una trama adictiva que es tanto el más fascinante de los tecno-thrillers como un revelador alegato sobre la vida en el vertiginoso, caótico e inquietante mundo de hoy.

Would it be very telling if I said I especially liked this book because it features VW Phaetons quite prominently? ( )

In a way it's a double relief to read something by Gibson - not only do I read his work to relax from reading more challenging writings but I don't feel compelled to write anything particularly insightful about it b/c there're bound to be so many more 'professional' reviews out there that my input isn't as 'important' as it might be on bks by more obscure authors.

The last bk I read by Gibson was "Idoru" wch I'm somewhat surprised to find I reviewed on GoodReads way back in September of 2009! I feel like I read it more recently than that. In that short review I wrote: "I read "Neuromancer" 1st & was excited by the CyberPunk genre b/c it seemed like an important new development in SF. Since then, it's become a bit hackneyed for me." & I gave "Idoru" a 3 star rating as I have w/ "Spook Country" here. But, once again, the rating system fails me. I liked "Spook Country" more than "Idoru" but I still rated it 3 stars b/c as I wrote in the other review: "what the fuck, I still like his writing alot - I just can't bring myself to give him a 4 or 5 star rating."

So, yeah, I enjoyed this & was relived that Gibson seems to've 'matured' & to be less reliant on deaths & more in tune w/ THE TRICKSTER. The classic pulp technique of interwoven narratives that eventually converge on each other works here as well as it usually does & Tito's reflexive reliance on spirit assistance achieved thru voodooistic training is a particularly nice touch - as is the use of Volapuk - an international language once the most 'successful' & now largely forgotten - showing, once again, that Gibson has done his homework. ( )

3.5 stars. Confusingly good. ( )

Spook Country, a book where absolutely nothing happens, in detail.

after 100 pages, i was still lost as to the point of this book. every character is dangerously interesting. nothing is cohesive, just chapter after chapter of loosely tied together story. just enough to keep you turning the pages, but not enough for you to know what is happening.

there is no “main protagonist” or “main antagonist” every character has their own agenda and none are good or evil. everyone has something going on and you are slowly led through the various stories until they all merge into one semi-cohesive semi-plot. every one of these characters deserves their own book.

dont hold your breath for a big bang ending though. when it all culminates in the last 25 pages, you will either be giggling at the cleverness or unhappy that you sat through it all.

i think this book would make a great film modified and directed by the cohen brothers.

thats it. no more review. as the books semi-plot doesnt have much to it besides build up, i would hate to give up anything specific.

i do really want to listen to the band “the curfew”, though they do not exist, i was left curious about their sound and influence.

--
xpost RawBlurb.com ( )

No matter when or where it is set, all the best science fiction is really about the present day. William Gibson takes this idea to its logical conclusion and writes about the present day as if it were science fiction.

Gibson seems mostly concerned with how our (real) technologies are transforming us. His main character, Hollis Henry (love the strong female characters that are always present in Gibson's work), the lead singer of a defunct band from the '90s, who is now trying to make it as a journalist. The start-up magazine for which she works has given her an assignment that's really little more than a cover. They hope that as she investigates locative technology in art, she'll also uncover the where-abouts of a mysterious cargo container. Without her knowledge, of course. There are two other characters we follow in the course of the narrative, neither of whom know the whole story either.

By keeping the characters and the readers in the dark about the narrative thread, Gibson creates a paranoid feeling that mimics that of the world we find ourselves living in. A world where, as one of the characters says, "America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11."

This is the second novel set in the "real world" by Gibson; a sort of follow up to Pattern Recognition. These two novels share one character between them: Advertising magnate, Hubertus Bigend. While not a huge presence in either book, he is the force that motivates both narratives. Again, Gibson is telling us something about the world we live in.

Gibson's writing here is bare-bones spare, but beautiful. He has the ability to turn a phrase that can stop the reader dead for a moment, but that then compels you to continue. To race to the completely satisfying conclusion.

( )

Definitely not the equal of Pattern Recognition. Rather disjointed and confusing - to some extent a stylistic choice, but perhaps taken too far. Not without its moments but one comes away oddly unfulfilled. ( )

"Locative art"; shipping container being located at sea; contaminate $10,000,000 in cash w/ radioactive Cesium

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2020/02/review-of-spook-country-by-william.html ( )

Although I like all of Gibson's stuff, this was a different kind of story for him, and it might be one of his best. ( )

I haven't read any Gibson in a while. It was a pleasant read, skipping quickly between 3 sets of characters who will, of course, sort of, meet up. Spooks come in different flavors, from creepy kidnapper to magnate to ex-rock star. They all kept themselves aloof, as spooks will, and it was never very deep. ( )

Spooky Country by William Gibson is the second book in his Blue Ant series, so you know Hubertus Bigend is a character, but much like in Pattern Recognition he's the invisible hand the alters the narrative, not a obvious actor. This novel focuses instead on Hollis Henry, an aspiring journalist that Bigend hires to find the elusive Bobby Chombo.

As always, I'm blown away by how much Gibson gets right. It's so nice to read a book about someone who can talk about current technology without sounding like a completely idiot. It's similarly pleasing to read a book where the author is also quite good at predicting future technology trends.

I very much enjoyed this book, particularly the changing of POV for each chapter. It stacked up well in comparison to Pattern Recognition, having a similarly mysterious plot, and a cast of fascinating characters. I thought the payoff was a little bit less impressive, but that could just be because this plot was similarly structured, even if the way it was written wasn't. Maybe Bigend is just less fun the second time you meet him? ( )

Pattern recognition was a much better novel in the series, but I love Hubertus Bigend's character ( )

One thing that I've noticed about William Gibson's Blue Ant books are that they keep you guessing about everything, right along with the main character. Spook Country starts out with three seemingly random stories following completely different characters, and slowly starts to pull them together into a complicated web. The main story follows Hollis Henry, ex singer, now an aspiring journalist, as she starts working on a project for a startup magazine. It turns out that the magazine is owned by Blue Ant, whose owner wants her to do more than just write about art. Blue Ant, and its owner Hubertus Bigend, show up in a couple of other Gibson books. The book keeps you reading just because you want to find out how everything fits together.