Spook Country is a 2007 novel by speculative fiction author William Gibson. A political thriller set in contemporary North America, it followed on from the author's previous novel, Pattern Recognition (2003), and was succeeded in 2010 by Zero History, which featured much of the same core cast of characters. The plot comprises the intersecting tales of three protagonists: Hollis Henry, a musician-turned-journalist researching a story on locative art; Tito, a young Cuban-Chinese operative whose family is on occasion in the employ of a renegade ex-CIA agent; and Milgrim, a drug-addled translator held captive by Brown, a strangely authoritarian and secretive man. Themes explored include the ubiquity of locative technology, the eversion of cyberspace and the political climate of the United States in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Spook Country quickly reached mainstream North American bestseller lists and was nominated for British Science Fiction Association and Locus Awards.
Plot summary
The first strand of the novel follows Hollis Henry, a former member of the early 1990s cult band The Curfew and a freelance journalist. She is hired by advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend to write a story for his nascent magazine Node (described as a European Wired) about the use of locative technology in the art world. Helped by curator Odile Richard she investigates Los Angeles artist Alberto Corrales, who recreates virtually the deaths of celebrities such as River Phoenix. Corrales leads her to Bobby Chombo, an expert in geospatial technologies who handles Corrales' technical requirements. Chombo's background is troubleshooting navigation systems for the United States military. He is reclusive and paranoid, refusing to sleep in the same GPS grid square on consecutive nights, and only consents to talk to Hollis due to his admiration for The Curfew.
Tito is part of a Chinese Cuban family of freelance "illegal facilitators", as Brown describes them – forgers, smugglers, and associated support personnel based in New York City – and is assigned by his uncles to hand over a series of iPods to a mysterious old man. Tito is adept in a form of systema that encompasses tradecraft, a variant of free running, and the Santería religion. It is alluded that the old man may have connections to American intelligence circles and Tito hopes he can explain the mysterious death of his father. When the old man calls in a favour, his family dispatches Tito on a dangerous new assignment.
The identity of the old man remains unclear, though context implies that he may be Pattern Recognition's protagonist Cayce Pollard's father, having removed himself from the channels of normal life to focus on disrupting what he sees as criminal elements operating in the United States Government.
Tracking Tito's family is a man known as Brown, a brusque and obstinate lead covert operative for a shadowy organization of unclear connection to the U.S. government. Of neoconservative orientation, Brown appears to have a background in law enforcement, but little training in tradecraft. Brown and his team attempt to track the activities of the old man and Tito with the help of Brown's captive Milgrim, whom he has translate the volapük-encoded Russian used by Tito's family to communicate. Milgrim is addicted to anti-anxiety drugs and is kept docile and compliant by Brown, who controls his supply of Rize. Brown believes that Tito and the old man are in possession of information that would, if revealed, undermine public confidence in the U.S.'s participation in the Iraq War. In his attempts to capture them and their data, however, Brown is instead fed disinformation through the old man's intricate schemes.
The three strands of the novel converge on a shipping container of unspecified cargo that is being transported via a circuitous route to an unknown destination. In Vancouver, the old man's team, with Hollis in tow, irradiate the shipping container, which is revealed to contain millions of U.S. dollars diverted from Iraq reconstruction funds.
Background and composition
Initial conception and development The writing process for Spook Country began for Gibson with a desire to write a novel, but without any ideas or themes that he wished to explore. The impetus for the story grew out of the author's visual impressions of Lower Manhattan in winter, from which the character of Tito emerged. Little of the material in his original pitch of the novel (posted online as part of an early promotional campaign by the book's publishers) survived in the final draft. The original proposal focused on "Warchalker", an obscure Iraqi warblog which chronicles the story of a disappeared consignment of millions of Iraqi reconstruction money. The readers of the blog included a female networks theorist interested in locative technology, and a Manhattanite of mixed heritage who freelanced with his family for organized crime. The plot would have followed those readers' attempt to track a shipping container through Warchalker on behalf of an unnamed villain.
The characters from the proposal did appear in the final version, albeit in much-altered form. An early draft featuring the musician-turned-journalist Hollis and half-Cuban spy Tito as the two protagonists did not satisfy Gibson, and so he introduced the character of Milgrim, the drug-addled translator. The story of Tito's family of Chinese exiles in Cuba turning to crime was not based on historical events, though their role as "illegal facilitators" was inspired by real crime families specializing in smuggling, a phenomenon Gibson encountered in the course of his work with the futurist consulting entity Global Business Network. Although he had intended his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition to be a standalone work, elements of it manifested in the script of its eventual successor, including the character of amoral marketing guru Hubertus Bigend. As Gibson developed the plot, "it became apparent that Node, the shadowy magazine startup, was way Bigendian", and thus Spook Country came to inhabit the same fictional universe as its predecessor. In a January 2007 interview, the author revealed that the later novel was set in the spring of 2006, and described the shared world of the novels as "more or less the one we live in now".
Gibson was first introduced to locative media websites through links from a friend, and initially found the phenomenon to be "excessively nerdy and very conceptual". Despite his finding compelling the idea of a digital grid mapping the surface of the earth, Gibson saw little storytelling traction in geocaching and geohacking, and instead reworked the material into the locative art of the novel. "When I started, I thought that the 'locative art' stuff would work the way immersion technology did in my earlier fiction", he commented in a subsequent interview. "Then I started liking that it wasn’t going to do that." The conception of the artworks in the novel was derived from the lowbrow art movement, and was inspired by the movement's talismanic Juxtapoz, the only art magazine Gibson was reading regularly at the time. The novel exhibits Gibson's characteristic brand awareness (a key plot element of Pattern Recognition), which he honed while poring over catalogues of products as part of his writing process. The author found the writing process unnerving, as the solution to the mystery of the container – the novel's MacGuffin – did not come to him until after he had written several hundred pages of manuscript.
Pre-release
Gibson announced the novel on October 6, 2006, on his blog, where fragments of the work were posted non-sequentially for some time, leading to much reader speculation on the content and plot of the novel. The following day, the blog featured an exploration of the mooted title by close friend and collaborator Jack Womack. In August 2007, Gibson made an appearance in the virtual world Second Life to give a reading of the novel; later reflecting on the experience, he remarked that the Second Life construct was "a lot more corporate" than he had imagined. A report in The Times described the event as "heavily freighted with meaning" in light of Gibson's role in shaping conceptions of cyberspace and virtual worlds.
In an interview to promote the release of the novel, Gibson revealed that one of the issues that had most affected his writing process since Pattern Recognition was the sense that everything in the text was potentially searchable online. "It's as though there is a sort of invisible hyperlink theoretical text that extends out of the narrative of my novel in every direction", he commented. A recipient of an advanced reading copy initiated Node Magazine, a literary project in the guise of the novel's fictional magazine, with the intent of annotating the novel. The author, under the nom de plume patternBoy, mobilised a cadre of volunteers to track the references and collate the cloud of data surrounding the work – those elements of the story with footprints on internet resources such as Google and Wikipedia. The project had precedent in Joe Clark's PR-Otaku, an attempt at logging and annotating Pattern Recognition, but whereas that took several years to develop, Node was complete before the novel was even published.
Themes
Spook Country explores themes relating to espionage, war profiteering and esoteric martial artistry, as well as familiar themes from the author's previous novels such as the unintended uses for which technology is employed (e.g. locative art) and the nature of celebrity. The author's preoccupation with semiotics and apophenia in Pattern Recognition is carried over in the sequel. In a review for The Guardian, Steven Poole observed that "This is a novel about, and also full of, ghost-signs, or signs that may not be signs, and about the difficulty of telling the difference. Gibson delights in saturating the pages with data that may or may not encode clues for the reader."
Eversion of cyberspace Through its treatment of locative technology, the novel revisits notions of virtual reality and cyberspace prominent in Gibson's early cyberpunk fiction. One character proposes that cyberspace is everting; becoming an integral and indistinguishable element of the physical world rather than a domain to be visited. During the book tour for the novel, Gibson elaborated on this theme, proposing that the ubiquity of connectivity meant that what had been called "cyberspace" is no longer a discrete sphere of activity separate from and secondary to normal human activity, but that those increasingly less common parts of normal life free from connectivity were the exception. "If the book has a point to make where we are now with cyberspace", he commented, it was that cyberspace "has colonized our everyday life and continues to colonize everyday life."
Class divide One of the elements of the novel that the author found most poignant was that of class division and how there is a subset of people who have access to a world of power and wealth that the vast majority will never experience, of which Gibson cited Brown and his evidently routine use of a private jet as an example. The author felt that at the time of writing, such social chasms were widening, and drew parallels to the Victorian era as well as to the world of his breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984) in which there is no middle class, only the super-rich and a predominantly criminal underclass.
In an interview with The Telegraph promoting the novel, Gibson conjectured that the world was moving to a situation wherein social status is determined by "connectivity" – access to communications technology – rather than material wealth.
Political climate of the post-9/11 world