Spook Country
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4.3 • 168 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. When a mysterious, not yet actual magazine, Node, hires former indie rocker turned journalist Hollis Henry to do a story on a new art form that exists only in virtual reality, Hollis finds herself investigating something considerably more dangerous. An operative named Brown, who may or may not work for the U.S. government, is tracking a young, Russian-speaking Cuban-Chinese criminal named Tito. Brown's goal is to follow Tito to yet another operative known only as the old man. Meanwhile, a mysterious cargo container with CIA connections repeatedly appears and disappears on the worldwide Global Positioning network, never quite coming to port. At the heart of the dark goings-on is Bobby Chombo, a talented but unbalanced specialist in Global Positioning software who refuses to sleep in the same spot two nights running. Compelling characters and crisp action sequences, plus the author's trademark metaphoric language, help make this one of Gibson's best. 8-city author tour.
Customer Reviews
character-driven, espionage-"lite"
Not quite as engaging as Pattern Recognition, but, in and of itself, a great character study, and often tongue-in-cheek, in regards to many issues of the modern age. Takes the continually-used themes of “people caught up in the schemes of people more rich and powerful than themselves”, and makes them interesting. From the man who dreamed of hyperspace, it's so great to see him still on the cutting edge of what's happening and what will happen, sooner than we think.
Typos Detract From the Story
An interesting story, but there are quite a few missing spaces between words in regular text and italics, and some capitalized words. This seems to occur on every other page and keeps taking me out of the story, otherwise I would give it a higher rating.
One of his best
As Gibson has grown as a writer, he's streamlined his style-- gotten closer and closer to contemporary times. Now, with Spook Country, he's chasing the past. A pop-culture kaleidoscope, a thriller, a believer in all possibilities. This book looks under the bed.