That’s only one of the Big Ideas in Spook Country. Like his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, with which Spook Country shares some characters and themes, the new one is set in the present day. Let me quickly add, though, the man is not stupid. Why read sci-fi when you can log onto YouTube at your local Starbucks, via wireless Internet, and watch the future swallowing us up in real time?Īlas, these developments serve not only to demonstrate Gibson’s perspicacity as an idea man, but also to expose his shortcomings as a novelist. Indeed, we’re so wired the world we live in has become indistinguishable from science fiction, thereby rendering obsolete the kind of near-future sci-fi favored by Gibson.

We all have personal computers now - not to mention iPods, and Blackberries, and Bluetooth. Events in the real world have overtaken those in his novels.

William Gibson, possibly the most influential science-fiction writer of the past 30 years, seems to have missed class that day, if his ninth novel, Spook Country, is any indication.Īs the leading founder of “cyberpunk,” the 1980s subgenre that was the first to imagine the enormous changes in human life soon to be wrought by the onrushing digital age, Gibson finds himself in the same fix that stymied spymaster John LeCarre after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Novel Writing 101, surely, includes the injunction that if you have only one narrative voice, then you might consider steering away from multiple points of view.

Spook Country by William Gibson