|
High Point:Gibson uses locative art (a significant plot element of Vernor Vinge's recent Rainbows End, by which point it has become the mass media) as a metaphor for secrets, and the things that lurk beneath our workaday world. He continues to demonstrate an understanding of the technologies that will change our world, and describes them vividly.In my review of Pattern Recognition, I said that Gibson makes our world feel like SF. It may be more correct to say that his vision of SF was prescient enough to predict certain aspects of our world with a surprising degree of accuracy.
If the resolution to the whole thing seems disappointingly trivial, I never got the impression the resolution was Gibson's point. For the most part, the missing canister is a traditional Hitchcock McGuffin (though Gibson does eventually tell us what's in it). Mainly Gibson's goal is to examine the secret world beneath the surface of the one we inhabit daily. It's overtly symbolized here by the locative art; travel to a specific destination labeled on your GPS tracker, pop on your VR goggles, and you'll see something that isn't there. Likewise, all around us, wheels are being turned, economies and governments influenced by powerful people whom we never see, or whom we may see while remaining blissfully unaware of what they're actually up to. One clever stroke is the way Gibson has characters using today's most ubiquitous tech toy, the iPod, to pass along secret coded information. If there were a better way to hide in plain sight in this day and age, I can't think of it.
In Science Fiction Novel, Present Feels Like Future Weekend Edition Sunday, August 19, 2007 · Science fiction novelist William Gibson has a talent for making the future seem like the present. But his newest book, Spook Country, does the opposite. It follows a half-dozen characters as they chase after the contents of a mysterious container.
William Gibson exclusive interview on Amazon Wire Amazon.com: So do you think that's your own career path, that you're less interested in imagining a future, or do you think that the world is changing? Gibson: I think it's actually both. Until fairly recently, I had assumed that it was me, me being drawn to use this toolkit I'd acquired when I was a teenager, and using my old SF toolkit in some kind of attempt at naturalism, 21st-century naturalistic fiction. But over the last five to six years it's started to seem to me that there's something else going on as well, that maybe we're in what the characters in my novel Idoru call a "nodal point," or a series of them. We're in a place where things could just go anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross's argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It's not going to happen. We're not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it's so convincing. I read that and I'm like, "My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child."
He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different times zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I.
Speaking by phone from Seattle, the first stop of his book tour, Gibson talked to Salon about virtual readings, the Google-era novel, and post-9/11 reality. You recently did a reading in the virtual world of Second Life, where you are a kind of patron saint. I got shut out -- I didn't realize capacity would be an issue -- but I caught up with it afterward on YouTube. Did the event turn out as you'd expected? Apparently there's always finite space in Second Life. I was actually in a room at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver with a live audience so I wasn't paying much attention to the Second Life aspect, which is probably a good thing in terms of my performance. I had a laptop open so I could see it as if I was watching from within Second Life. What I saw I found a bit distracting -- people levitating and sitting on top of the microphone. How much time had you spent in Second Life by yourself? Just a couple of hours. I think it only works if you're hooked up socially. Otherwise it's like walking around outside a shopping mall in Edmonton, Alberta, at 4 in the morning in December. You never see anybody and if you do, chances are they run away. Some people have called Second Life the fulfillment of your vision of cyberspace. Does it at all resemble what you had in mind in 1984 when you wrote about a "consensual hallucination" in "Neuromancer"? It is and it isn't the vision I had. It's what the characters in my early novels would call a "construct" -- that was a word I used before virtual reality was around. I did imagine constructs where people could appear in avatar form. And in "Idoru," I imagined these teenage girls leading virtual lives in abandoned corporate Web sites which they'd taken over and altered to build themselves a hideout. Those are the two things in my fiction closest to Second Life, but they're not really anything like it. It never would have occurred to me to write something about a corporation building a virtual world in which shopping and real estate were two of the most popular activities. It sounds like too conventional a science-fiction novel.
Gibson is the man who, after all, in the late '80s observed, "The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." He arranges glasses and cutlery on the restaurant table to describe how our lives have changed. "When I wrote 'Neuromancer' " almost 25 years ago, he says, "cyberspace was there, and we were here. In 2007, what we no longer bother to call cyberspace is here, and those increasingly rare moments of nonconnectivity are there. And that's the difference. There's no scarlet-tinged dawn on which we rise and look out the window and go, 'Oh my God, it's all cyberspace now.' " That, nonetheless, is the sort of recent past examined in "Spook Country." It's plenty strange. His spring of 2006 involves a female main character who was once the lead singer of a rock band and is now reporting for a start-up magazine called Node, which may or may not ever publish a first issue. There are also a Cuban-Chinese New Yorker whose family business is crime-enabling, a mysterious old man who may or may not have once been important in American intelligence, and a recluse who has turned an advanced form of global positioning into a radical new art form with sinister applications. Many other characters run the gut-tightening gamut of the clever and the damned.
A new trend is emerging on the horizon of writing and could subvert the dynamics of publishing a radical and far more incisive than you predstavijo e-book. A launch, a group of fans inspired by the revolutionary movement in writers: William Gibson. NodeMagazineL’uscita last awaited novel by William Gibson has been accompanied by a roll really. When the book had not yet entered the circuit of British and American libraries, a handful of tough fans, who have come in possession of a copy of reading Spook Country, had already begun to establish a network promotional totally unconventional. The material narrative of the novel has become the subject of a thorough and methodical analysis, which has resolved the design of a web-magazine that in the name refers to a magazine quoted by the same Gibson in its history. But if the Node of Spook Country Magazine is a publication dedicated to new frontiers of interactive, designed to explore the network of relationships between people, objects and places, the Node Magazine of real world has become an ambitious project to catalogue all touched the knowledge or even touched by the novel and its author, not only as it concerns the building or structure. It is no coincidence that the literary critic John Sutherland said that the project threatens to “overturn the habits of literary criticism.” It all started when the creator of the project, still unnamed, has put his hands on a copy reading of the novel and decided to mobilize a volunteer to trace the entire network of references and shape the cloud of information related to book, without sparing nothing in the work found in the database network from search engines, from Google to Wikipedia. The architect of the project, masked behind the nickname patternBoy, conceived the Node Magazine as a “multi-blog pseudo-news from narrative Spook Country”, but at the time of its conception certainly did not envision himself to finish focus of the media. The intention of starting a text to a more detailed narrative of the birth from that work is not without precedent: in hypertext, the same thing had been accomplished precisely on the same last novel Gibson, Pattern Recognition ( The academy in Italy Dream), by another passionate hidden behind pseudonym. But if the work was at the party after the publication of the novel and had required about two years to reach its final form, in this case, the project started on February 7 this year, has brought forward the release of the novel and accompanied step by step dissemination to the general public, gaining official recognition of Gibson in person.
'When I started the Node project, I originally planned a multi-author blog of fictional news stories in the Spook Country universe. 'When someone suggested that the site might be a subject of interest once the “inevitable googling begins” post-publication, I thought they were crazy. But just in case, I thought, it might be good to have something worth finding if anyone does. 'Inspired not only by my favorite author, but at least as much by Anton Rauben Weiss’s amazing William Gibson aleph site and Joe Clark’s PR-Otaku, I set out to compile a doorway into the spooks within Spook Country. 'Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that more than a few people would find these posts, much less William Gibson himself [who seems to like it - I guess I will find out in person on Saturday in Boulder, CO]. 'I want to thank all of those people who provided comments, encouraging words, and insights, especially my new friend Memetic Engineer. 'And now, maybe it’s time to reinvigorate the original idea for Node with the Chapter 85 project. If you are interested in exploring the world of “cyberspace turned inside out”'click here to see blog
A woman moves through a forest of symbols, peopled by liminal obsessives, gathering clues to a conspiratorial mystery. So might you describe Thomas Pynchon's diabolically lean and funny The Crying of Lot 49, perhaps the most perfect American novel of its age. Fitting the same description is the new novel by William Gibson, whose own literary trajectory has seen him develop from noir prophet of cyberspace (the word he coined in Neuromancer, 1984) to a kind of wi-fi'd Pynchon for the present.
Q&A: William Gibson, science fiction novelist Heading into Spook Country with the cyberspace guru What would you say are the big themes of Spook Country? In the process of doing the tour I will be informed by interviewers of what the broad themes are. I haven't been interviewed sufficiently to be able to tell you. It's set in the same world as Pattern Recognition and involves some of the same characters but they're a few years down the road and the world has changed a bit. I suppose one of the things it's trying to do is take some measure of how much the world has changed since Pattern Recognition. How has technology changed writing? The thing that has affected me most directly during Pattern Recognition, and subsequently, is the really strange new sense I have of the Google-ability of the text. It's as though there is a sort of invisible hyperlink theoretical text that extends out of the narrative of my novel in every direction.
Having grown up in America, Gibson escaped to Canada in 1967 to avoid the Vietnam war draft. Ever since then he has lived in the Vancouver area, though still retaining his US citizenship. His first novel, Neuromancer, was a roaring success, selling over 6.5 million copies since it was published in 1985. Some have interpreted his 2003 book, Pattern Recognition, as a shift from a gloomy post-humanist world to the discovery of a new source for hope and effective action in “embodied everyday experience”. His latest thriller, Spook Country, is set in the spring of 2006, the same year in which it was written, thus fulfilling an aim he set out a decade ago: “I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction’s best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going… Earth is the alien planet now.” For those who are not techno-geeks, many expressions in Spook Country may be unfamiliar, even daunting, as in: “If she moved the PowerBook, she’d lose the WiFi from across the street, though this page would still be cached.” On every page we inhabit a strange world of techno-babble. Not only WiFis and WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy, already superseded by WPA), but Locative Art, GPS grids, geohacking, Handspring Treo smartphones, Virgin RIFID and geo-spatial tagging systems, not to mention the more familiar iPod. All this is naturally par for the course in the hi-tech world of espionage and counter-surveillance, which is Gibson’s bread and butter. Each short chapter shifts the action not only to a different character, but also to another location - Los Angeles, New York, Buenos Aires and Vancouver – in a bravado evocation of the Brave New World of today’s interconnected, globalised planet. A vision of the future coexisting with the present arises slowly and mysteriously out of the meshing of the four main characters in a complex web of intrigue. Instead of a linear story line, the story is cinematically crafted out of the seemingly disparate worlds of Hollis Henry, Milgrim, Bobby Chombo and Tito.
|
Thoughts on Spook Country by William Gibsonone
Thoughts on Pattern Recognition by William GibsonOneTwo Three Four Five Six Seven
sites
book of joe
|
