William Gibson's Spook Country

Here is William Gibson discussing his soon to be released novel, Spook Country, which is a somewhat tangential continuation of Pattern Recognition as one of that novel’s characters, Hubertus Bigend, makes an appearance in the new novel as well. The interview is interesting in its discussion of character and writing process, particularly the participatory role readers play through Gibson’s blog.

The promise of Spook Country as a kind of continutation of Pattern Recognition makes me happy as I thought his last novel was one of his best. It was a decided departure from the more speculative/futuristic content of his earlier work in that it is set in the present and, as Gibson says in the interview, explores the cultural changes in the U.S. since 9/11.

That said, it shares a common theme in exploring the intersection of technology and politics. As Gibson notes, technology is very rarely legislated into existence. That obviously shouldn’t be taken to mean technology emerges in apolitical spaces. However it does mean that technological development can disrupt political order, a very Marxian observation, I would think.

Anyway, I thought Pattern Recognition did a great job of capturing the global media network, of giving us an affective experience with that network, and exploring the development of a kind of distributed cognition, so I’m hoping Spook Country will continue in this direction.

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