| PRODUCT DETAILS | | Spook Country |  | |
Spook Country
Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.
Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.
Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.
Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post "rave."
Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), "One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century."
Manufacturer: Putnam Adult
Price: $4.39
 Spook Country
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| User Reviews |  | Still good
rating: 4
After reading the reviews here i was somewhat dismayed. Could all that nattering point to *exactly* what Gibson prefers to sidestep? His stories are fun. No they aren't thrillers and they aren't violent, they are wonderfully written imaginative stories with gentle, optimistic endings - have all you nabobs fallen into the pit our culture has dug ("if it isn't nasty, violent and edgy - it ain't good")?
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so real...
rating: 5
So real after these last money melting weeks.
A must read to get away from it all.
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Cyberpunk meets John le Carré, but not Tom Clancy.
rating: 4
Gibson, for me was always an automatic read. Still is. Since I have recently read 'easy' novels (like Twilight, on the request of my daughter), I was slowed and confused by the first couple of pages. I forgot what a constant wall of cultural references was like, and how it makes one think. Then it becomes fun, and interesting.
I am no longer impressed by gratuitous wacky descriptions, like "the sky was like the polished steel of an assassin's blade" - not the Gibson ever says that, but he more or less perfected the art. He has a whole new batch of that stuff for this novel. Some of it is fun, and some I just gloss over. I must admit that I am his ideal audience because I more or less 'got' all of his references, and cultural/technical references are the joie de vivre of this novel.
I liked the spy part: very smart, and I was only slightly disappointed when I guessed the ending 50 pages before the end. That didn't keep me from staying up two hours too late just to get to it. It closes nicely, I was never bored.
What I didn't like was the political aspect of it. I am perfectly capable of forming my own conspiracy theories about the Iraq war, which are not really incompatible with his, but I'm both intrigued and disgruntled to find that in a 'spy' novel.
Yes, I'll still buy, and read his next novel. He hasn't turned me off as bad as Neil Stephenson did with that boring 'Baroque Cycle' thing (blech), or David Brin with 'Infinity's Shore' (double blech). How do great authors get boring? I'm still a Gibson fan.
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Don't waste your time
rating: 1
This book reads like a chore. The style is smug, the plot is plodding, and the abrupt chapters make it impossible to become truly immersed in it. There are a few redeeming qualities here, but don't waste your time sifting through this swamp to get to them. Read this book if you're stuck in an elevator, otherwise, move on.
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Gotta get this off my chest
rating: 3
I've been reading William Gibson since he was first hailed as the Cyberpunk messiah back in the late Eighties. At the risk of being savaged for this review, all these years later, I am still asking myself why this guy is so popular as an author and why I keep falling for the marketing hoopla and buying his books. He is not a bad author but he is certainly not a great one either. Spook country isn't any better than previous novels, nor is it any worse, it's just another mediocre book. Frankly, I have found all his books tolerable but none of them particularly exciting, memorable or terribly inventive.
Gibson gets a lot of mainstream recognition in the press for his books but honestly there are much better Science Fiction authors out there and even many better Cyberpunk authors out there. Bruce Sterling, who came up the ranks at the same time as Gibson, even colloborated with him on occasion, wrote more inventive and imaginative fiction but never got the same level of recognition. Many other authors since then have written extremely good cyberpunk including Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) and Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book), and Peter Hamilton's Greg Mandel series which starts with Mindstar Rising.
I'm not bashing on Gibson, more power to him that he captured the mainstream attention, I'm merely trying to point out that in my honest opinion he is certainly not the best writer in the field. I think I actually enjoyed Spook Country a little more than most of his fiction, particularly because of the Cubano/Asian crime family in NYC city he introduces into the story. They were particularly interesting in this story of a missing shipping container and the secretive manouverings of the government, billionaires, and rogue espionage agents who are all contending against each other in a race to be the first to find the container. The denouement was well thought out and satisfying and in general I don't have a lot of negatives to say about the book. After finishing it though my thoughts were simply that this was an OK book, not a wonderful one, and I think Gibson gets a lot of attention that other writers may more appropriately merit.
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Spook Country
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