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William Gibson

Spook Country (Blue Ant) Paperback – March 3, 2009

by William Gibson (Author)

522 ratings

Book 2 of 3: Blue Ant

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The “cool and scary”(San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer.

• spook (spo͞ok) n.: A specter; a ghost. Slang for “intelligence agent.”
• country (ˈkən-trē) n.: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind.
• spook country (spo͞ok ˈkən-trē) n.: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place we are learning to live.

Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him...

“A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.”—The Washington Post Book World

Print length

512 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Berkley
Publication date

March 3, 2009
Dimensions

4.3 x 1.07 x 7.47 inches
ISBN-10

0425226719
ISBN-13

978-0425226711
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes.”—Los Angeles Times

“Arguably the first example of the post-post-9/11 novel, whose characters are tired of being pushed around by forces larger than they are—bureaucracy, history and, always, technology—and are at long last ready to start pushing back.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Gibson excels at pinpointing the hidden forces that shape our world.”—Details

“[A] dazed, mournful quality…[An] evocation of post-9/11 displacement, the sense of a world in which nothing seems fixed or reassuring…one of our vital novelists.”—Newsday

“Although wearing the trappings of a thriller, Spook Country is essentially a comedy, albeit a dry, dark, and disturbing one.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A fitful, fast-forward spy tale...It’s to Gibson’s credit that he weaves his strands of disparate narrators, protagonists and foils, and his panoply of far-forward technology, into a vivid, suspenseful and ultimately coherent tale.”—USA Today

“Part thriller, part spy novel, part speculative fiction, Gibson’s provocative work is like nothing you have ever read before.”—Library Journal

“Set in the same high-tech present day as Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s fine ninth novel offers startling insights into our paranoid and often fragmented postmodern world....Compelling characters and crisp action sequences, plus the author’s trademark metaphoric language, help make this one of Gibson’s best.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Gibson excels as usual in creating an off-kilter atmosphere of vague menace.”—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero, Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Berkley; Reprint edition (March 3, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0425226719
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0425226711
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.3 x 1.07 x 7.47 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #817,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,773 in Technothrillers (Books)
- #3,524 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #6,432 in Political Thrillers (Books)

Customer Reviews:
522 ratings

About the author

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William Gibson

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William Gibson was born in the United States in 1948. In 1972 he moved to Vancouver, Canada, after four years spent in Toronto. He is married with two children.

Customer reviews

5 star		54%
4 star		25%
3 star		15%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Fascinatingbooks

I didn't just read this book, I experienced it. Wow!

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2016

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Once in a great while a book comes along that transcends the events written about and explains something of deep and cosmic importance. I was stunned by the real story, uncoiling like an invisible serpent of stars, behind the "on the page" story of a woman hired to possibly write for a new magazine, and a parallel story of intrigue amongst a motley collection of spies. These stories coil around each other like a DNA helix to create a new being, a glimpse into a future that could go so wrong or incredibly right. This is Hollis in Wonderland as told by Gibson, a sci-fi cyber punk writer of epic proportions. I am practically obsessed with this book, both in print and the audio read in an intimate and engaging way by the incomparable Robertson Dean. The story is interdimensional, with so many levels to explore I can get lost in a single sentence like a maze that opens doors in my own mind. I didn't just read this book, I experienced it like a psychedelic trip down a white Lego lined rabbit hole.

16 people found this helpful

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Jeff the Zombie

Another Solid Novel from William Gibson

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2010

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There are few authors whose entire literary output I've read, but William Gibson falls firmly inside that camp. From the ground-breaking Neuromancer, which I originally read when I was a teenager in the early 1990's, through Spook Country, the second Gibson novel set in the "real" world, he has explored the cultural shifts created by technology and has proven more accurate and relevant than almost every other author working in speculative fiction. Now that much of what he imagined has come to pass (either through the world mimicking his work, or merely catching up to it), he's now commenting on the impact of technology.

Spook Country follows three characters -- Hollis, the former lead singer of a semi-successful indie rock band, Tito, the young member of a Cuban "boutique" crime family, and Milgrim, an addict who has somehow fallen in with a mysterious intelligence agent called Brown. All are swept up into the search for a cargo container that keeps shuffling around the GPS grid, a search that will eventually lead them to converge in a single place.

McGuffins are nothing new to Gibson's novels, used primarily as a vehicle for exploring societal shifts, and the shipping container in Spook Country is no exception. In this case, however, he uses a McGuffin to examine the impact of computer-generated worlds on our own perception of reality, the atemporal nature of celebrity (including an interesting mediation on the trust that people are willing to invest in celebrities, who would otherwise be strangers to them), Iraq war profiteering, Bush-era paranoia and the infusion of pagan religion into contemporary Catholicism.

There is a startling array of threads and ideas spun out of Gibson's mystery shipping container, and although the ending is not as satisfying as his past works, the ideas he brings up are definite worth exploring.

This may not be Gibson's best book (I'm still partial to Virtual Light), but it's certainly an entertaining and thought-provoking of life in the mid-oughties. Definitely recommended to both old fans and novices alike.

3 people found this helpful

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gorden

A neoclassic spy-detective work of art

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2008

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This novel is another great piece of work by one of the truly most gifted and innovative authors writing in English for the past 25 years. Gibson's sparse, poetic style always leaves much for the reader's intelligence to fill in, consistently giving enough of a suggestion for the reader to paint the lines. Unlike the dark, futuristic sci-fi outings of his earlier novels, and more akin to his 2003 Pattern Recognition, Spook Country is set squarely in the present, a present suffused with cutting edge techno-tidbits from the world of espionage, holographs of celebrities' deaths that rely on ramped-up GPS, or the freaky lifestyle of a paranoid 3D-rendering specialist.

The heart of this story is an espionage mystery, but who is chasing whom, and to what end? The plot thickens around, on the one hand a family of Russian trained Cuban ex-pat's practicing their spy tradecraft with devotion and skill, and on the other a drug addicted kidnap victim being dragged around and controlled by a mysterious detective-type. The object of the quests of these two factions remains unknown for most of the book, but that only sweetens the mystery. There is plenty of suspense and action.

The Machiavellian uber-publisher/advertiser and seemingly omniscient manipulator from Pattern Recognition, Hubertus Bigend, puts his own horse into the race to unravel the mystery. That horse is Hollis Henry, former rock singer and aspiring journalist. The chase for what-is-sought takes us deep into the heart of motive, greed, spycraft, cultural meaning, and ultimately to a negation of the value of the object of the search. The ending, which I won't spoil, evokes that of Hammett's classic detective tale, The Maltese Falcon - also a wild search for an unknown object whose value is negated at the tale's end.

Gibson sits at a nexus that he alone seems to occupy, from he which he spins tales with deep insight into the edges of technology and their roles in shaping art, commerce, corruption, and high and not-so-high culture. And as always, he writes brilliantly.

2 people found this helpful

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David Barnett

Falling over the cutting edge...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 3, 2022

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Probably fair to say I had some misgivings about Pattern Recognition, the first book in this trilogy. Indeed upon finishing this follow up I pondered if I could get away with just copying and pasting the same thoughts into this review as many of the same points apply but you see, it wouldn't be entirely fair.

Sure there's still the same awe of the cutting edge and all those who dwell upon it. Again the trendy and the technological intermingles against a backdrop of the unreal and the virtual. Everytime the author attempts description, he still veers between clinical itemised lists and the odd bout of baffling verbiage. Sometimes his characters sound like human beings, sometimes they sound like on-brand actors in TV commercials.

So a lot of familiar territory here as we move on from cool hunters to hip ex-musicians turned journalists, locative art, Volapük, secret operatives, drug addicts and the logistics of international freight. Despite all the change in the subject matter, it all starts feeling very familiar very quickly.

If anything the pacing was more an issue here than it was in the first book with whole pages slowing the momentum right down to a halt on a regular basis. Again I get the sense that the author is highly invested in the subject matter to be sure but it rarely translates into an interesting treatment of character or plot.

Here we follow multiple characters and intrigues which starts promisingly enough but soon becomes subject to the same lack of forward momentum. By the end it felt like a perfunctory exercise in joining the dots. Threads reach their conclusion, everyone comes into the orbit of a mystery box and I end up wondering about all the time it takes to get there.

As I say it would be unfair to judge this book by another. In some ways it's better, in others it's certainly worse. Less an upward curve of improvement, more an uneven horizontal line that often threatens to get interesting but never quite gets there. The fascination with emergent trends loses its novelty when read long after the fact and what's left struggled to sustain my interest. It's neither a recommendation to read or avoid but maybe that's says it all.

S D HOLLOWAY

William Gibson is a remarkable writer.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 18, 2021

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I first read “Spook Country” thinking it was the same as Gibson’s other books and that’s how it seemed at the time. I then read it again and realised there was a lot more to it than I had noticed the first time, there was considerable depth to all the characters. They really develop as the story unfolds.

Then I had some time to read it much more slowly and carefully and it turned out to be all I have just said but it was also very, very funny. His descriptions of events were, if you read them carefully, really quite hilarious. All of the characters are so beautifully developed and yet are just unbelievably funny.

I really cannot recommend this book strong enough. It makes me want to go back read some of his other ones again and I think I’m going to have to this.

One person found this helpful

GelS

Secret Squirrels

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2012

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I've just finished this (my latest) William Gibson tale and loved it. His departure from the 'cyberpunk' genre in 'Pattern Recognition' is continued in this intriguing story; some of which follows 'Pattern Recognition,' but not as a sequel. 'Spook Country' is a refreshing tour of the USA with the usual, imaginative Gibson take on technology involved in, but not central to, the plot. It's probably too challenging to state a full synopsis of an ex- punk rocker trying to establish a new career as a journalist, simply because of the parallel sub-plots that fill out the story in a fascinating way. It has humour and a somewhat cynical view of life in the States, wrapped in a plot that grabbed my attention from the start and held it to the satisfying end. Gibson's mastery of the English language, as always, is a delight.

I loved it, especially having enjoyed 'Pattern Recognition' shortly before. I'd recommend 'Pattern Recognition' first to give added depth, but it's by no means essential: 'Spook Country' can stand on its own merits perfectly well. I'm looking forward to moving on to 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' next as a return to the original sci-fi series (it's in my Kindle already).

2 people found this helpful

DJR

William Gibson is from the Future

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 13, 2022

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What can you say about the guy whose work has predicted the internet, cyberspace, etc. The Blue Ant trilogy is such a gripping read, taking a scapel to the modern world (& the near future). I have read all his books & have yet to be disappointed. Well worth your time & energy.

Z de MC

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2008

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I have read all of William Gibson's books, since back when he was writing about a dystopian future heavily influenced by Japanese culture.

Some of the old Gibson is still there in this book, like separate characters converging at the end. However, the plot is thin & weak, and characters are just wandering in and out of rooms and cities without much to do or even say.

All we learn in the first 300 pages is that there is a container on a ship somewhere that interests a lot of people. It is only in the last 30 pages or so that things develop from there, when one of the shady characters decides to confide in our heroine (whom he has never seen before - huh?) and finally tells her (and us) what is going on. So now we know what is in the container and why these guys are after it, and the book ends soon afterwards. OK then.

The only character that is remotely interesting is the junkie, whose contribution to the plot is translating several sentences from a form of written Russian in latin alphabet. He is the only one with a credible inner world, thoughts and ideas. Gibson actually uses him on several occasions to voice his own thoughts on US stance on torture (blurted out when he was high), war on Iraq, etc.

In all, a disappointing book for those of us who know about Gibson's masterpieces. Perhaps he is getting old. Or maybe he should go back to writing about the future.

3 people found this helpful

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Spook Country (Blue Ant) Paperback – March 3, 2009

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