spook country

Spook Country is a novel by William Gibson, the grandfather of CyberPunk. I only say that because I bet he hates hearing that by now. I've read me some William Gibson in the past, and this one was a little...meyh, for me. The biggest problem was that this book took a while to get rolling... like, a hundred pages. Once I got past that and had a pretty good idea what this thing was all about, then I enjoyed the rest of it.

After taking a quick look around, I found (to my surprise) that Spook Country is actually the second book in Gibson's Blue Ant series. The first was Pattern Recognition, and it apparently shares some of the same characters, and I guess there may be some other connections.*

This one has little cyber edge to it, there's some virtual reality bits, and some tinkering around on the interwebs here and there, but its mainly weird, warmed-over cold war players and some shading money dealings. The strangely SPECTRE-esque quality of Blue Ant is a little campy, and that along with the cold-war taint, does give this whole book a throwback quality that I assume was the intent.

If you're a Gibson fan, I guess you'll enjoy this. If you've got a pal who can summarize the first hundred pages for you, even better. Crack it open there and give it a go. I can do that for you, if you'd like, just add a comment and I'll be happy to. hint: nothing happened.



* Take a look at my review of Pattern Recognition, by clicking on the link in the text above, or here. I wrote that the story didn't gel until about halfway thru, and then I enjoyed the rest. Maybe thats something else this series has in common? Not really sure I want to read the last one now...