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William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview How would you define the current moment? In your most recent novel, "Spook Country," the pervasive sensation is that the times are fraught. Fraught? [Laughs] Fraught is very good. I was going to quote Fredric Jameson about living in the simultaneous apprehension of dread and ecstasy, but I've already done that today. Yep. Fraught. Period.
Lorazepam has been mentioned in several contemporary media in recent years, with various clinical aspects highlighted. It is seen in medical situations, such as the TV series House, MD as the drug of choice for the cessation of seizures. A similar use is depicted in the movie Saw III where "Jigsaw" is being operated on and begins to convulse: the character performing the surgery yells many times for Ativan, but discovers that none is available in the limited operating area. Lorazepam, as an anxiolytic, is portrayed in the 2006 movie The Departed, where Vera Farmiga's character, Madolyn prescribes it to Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Billy. Blue October mentions Lorazepam in their song "HRSA", where it is being prescribed in a psychiatric ward for a similar use. The dependency problem is portrayed in William Gibson's 2007 book Spook Country, in which the character Milgrim is addicted to Ativan and the character Brown exploits Milgrim's addiction, in order to control him, through a steady supply of Ativan and Rize (a brand of the benzodiazepine clotiazepam). The first benzodiazepine, chlordiazepoxide (Librium) was discovered serendipitously in 1954 by the Austrian scientist Leo Sternbach (1908-2005), working for the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann–La Roche. Initially, he discontinued his work on the compound Ro-5-0690, but he "rediscovered" it in 1957 when an assistant was cleaning up the laboratory. Although initially discouraged by his employer, Sternbach conducted further research that revealed the compound was a very effective tranquilizer.
Nameless wildness and untrammelled freedom
"It becomes clear that Bigend is far less interested in locative art than he is in its technical whizz-kid, Bobby Chombo. As well as helping artists to articulate their virtual visions, Bobby is using his knowledge of GPS systems to track a shipping container being moved around the globe. Bigend knows that various parties, including government agencies and CIA-connected pirates (obviously), are interested in the container's contents."
College Crier Interview with Gibson T. Virgil Parker: Your early Sci-Fi commented obliquely on contemporary issues, but it gave you a very unique set of strategies that you're using to explicate the present. William Gibson: Well, I don't actually think they're unique because I acquired them through the course of working in the genre of science-fiction, but I also acquired a conviction that what they're actually good for, maybe the only thing that they're really good for, is trying to get a handle on our sort of increasingly confused and confusing present.
Surrounded by unseen presences "Gibson was one of the first to discuss how virtual presences might manifest themselves in the real world. In Count Zero, it was achieved through biochips physically implanted in the brain, allowing a virtual entity to possess a human (a process shown again, using a slightly different technology, in the Matrix sequels, where Agent Smith manages to leave the Matrix and take over a human body)."
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In Spook Country, the Milgrim character is forced into obeying Brown because Milgrim is addicted to Ativan. Brown provides him with Rize, a Japanese variant. Ironically, Stanley Milgram conducted some well known experiments at Yale that were concerned with obedience. Moreover, "Milgram created a documentary film titled Obedience showing the experiment and its results. He also produced a series of five social psychology films, some of which dealt with his experiments." In other words, footage.
"If recent history has revealed an appalling tolerance for prognosticators who are invariably, fatally wrong, it has also been unjust to the farsighted augurs who somehow always manage to get it right. When an author has correctly anticipated the extent to which people’s identities would someday be defined by their presence on the Internet, foreseen how the medium would generate its own pantheon of heroes and villains with nicknames like Essjay and lonelygirl15, and even name-checked the Japanese Harajuku scene before it could be hijacked by Gwen Stefani, he tends to have certain labels attached to him, like an old beater priced to sell at a used car lot: prophet, visionary, futurist. But what if he just wants to be a writer?"
Q&A: William Gibson discusses Spook Country and Interactive Fiction
"William Gibson has spent the bulk of his career creating vivid, intensely detailed fictional futures that reflect, with uncanny precision, the rapidly shifting realities of contemporary life. This tendency was evident in his first novel, Neuromancer, which works both as an ingeniously constructed cyber thriller and as a meditation on the impact of information technology on every aspect of human society. When, in 2003, Gibson abandoned science fiction to produce an up-to-the-minute mainstream novel called Pattern Recognition, it came as no real surprise. In his way, Gibson has always written about the here and now. But with that book, he began a remarkable exploration of post-9/11 America that continues, with undiminished vigor, in Spook Country."
"The central plot device is, as in almost every other Gibson work, three small groups of characters pursuing story-threads in parallel (very close parallel in one case). Hubertus Bigend and Blue Ant are back, and the enigmatic magnate retains the services of a troubled woman to pursue a poorly-defined goal. Gibson’s done this before, twice; but Hollis Henry is stronger and less fucked-up than either Marly Kruschkova or Cayce Pollard, which makes her (for me anyhow) more empathetic. Also Bigend has become less menacing and oblique; it becomes evident fairly early on what he’s trying to do, and he acts sometimes like a merely-human marketing pro."
Official Site for Spook Country "Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post 'rave.' Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), 'One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century'."
"This blog is discusses and analyses the new book Spook Country by cyberpunk author William Gibson, published in August 2007. This will be primarily from a United Kingdom perspective, as some of the themes of espionage and surveillance and hidden forces really do resonate in our endemic Surveillance Society."
"Hollis is a character in the mold of Cayce Pollard, the logo-allergic 'coolhunter' of Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. Both of these appealing heroines -- curious, charismatic and essentially chaste -- share DNA with Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, all of them women on the verge of nerve-wracking conspiracies in which, Gibson writes, 'possession of information amounts to involvement'."
"Spook Country is a sequel of sorts to Pattern Recognition, an extension of its territory and themes. Masterminding the narrative of both is the sinister and seductive Hubertus Bigend, founder of the avant-garde advertising firm Blue Ant. In Pattern Recognition, he's described as 'a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgin's blood and truffled chocolates.' His Wikipedia entry in Spook Country describes him as the child of a wealthy industrialist and a sculptress with links to the Situationist International."
"The cast of characters in this book is gigantic and deeply weird. There's Hollis Henry, a faded pop star who finds herself covering the 'locative art scene' for a magazine that may or may not exist -- and that may or may not be associated with Hubertus Bigend, the powerful and lunatic branding exec from Pattern Recognition. Hollis injects the novel with introspection about fame, micro-fame, fleeting fame, and art."
"The book takes a multilayered approach similar to Gibson's novels prior to 2003's Pattern Recognition and treats themes relating to espionage, the nature of media (see Locative Art), and esoteric martial artistry, as well as familiar themes from the author's previous novels such as emergent phenomena and the sociocultural effects of technology."
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Thoughts on Pattern Recognition by William GibsonOneTwo Three Four Five Six Seven
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The Spirit of Freedom or the Free Spirit is attained when one is wholly transformed into God. This union is so complete that neither the Virgin Mary nor the Angels are able to distinguish between man and God. In it one is restored to one's original state, before one flowed out of the Deity. One is illumined by that essential light, beside which all created light is darkness and obfuscation. Rejoice with me, for I have become God. . . . I am made eternal in my eternal blessedness. [Schwester Katrei]