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    Spook Country
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    Spook Country
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    Spook Country
    Audiobook11 hours

    Spook Country

    Written by William Gibson

    Narrated by Robertson Dean

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The New York Times bestseller from "one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present."( Washington Post Book World)

    Hollis Henry is a journalist on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn't exist yet. Bobby Chombo is a producer working on cutting-edge art installations. In his day job, Bobby is a trouble-shooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one.

    Hollis Henry has been told to find him.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 7, 2007
    ISBN9781429586382
    Unavailable
    Spook Country
    Author

    William Gibson

    William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is credited with having coined the term “cyberspace,” and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed. His other novels include All Tomorrow’s Parties, Idoru, Virtual Light, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with his wife and two children.

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    Reviews for Spook Country

    3.5/5

    1,154 ratings78 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I haven't read any Gibson in a while. It was a pleasant read, skipping quickly between 3 sets of characters who will, of course, sort of, meet up. Spooks come in different flavors, from creepy kidnapper to magnate to ex-rock star. They all kept themselves aloof, as spooks will, and it was never very deep.
    • 4/5
      Spooky Country by William Gibson is the second book in his Blue Ant series, so you know Hubertus Bigend is a character, but much like in Pattern Recognition he's the invisible hand the alters the narrative, not a obvious actor. This novel focuses instead on Hollis Henry, an aspiring journalist that Bigend hires to find the elusive Bobby Chombo.As always, I'm blown away by how much Gibson gets right. It's so nice to read a book about someone who can talk about current technology without sounding like a completely idiot. It's similarly pleasing to read a book where the author is also quite good at predicting future technology trends.I very much enjoyed this book, particularly the changing of POV for each chapter. It stacked up well in comparison to Pattern Recognition, having a similarly mysterious plot, and a cast of fascinating characters. I thought the payoff was a little bit less impressive, but that could just be because this plot was similarly structured, even if the way it was written wasn't. Maybe Bigend is just less fun the second time you meet him?
    • 4/5
      Spy-style thrillers are not my usual type of fiction, but this was excellent! The characters are fantastic and the story keeps you guessing throughout. I recommend it!
    • 3/5
      I always enjoy reading Gibson novels and this one was no exception, but I did kind of wonder what the point was. All this plot to prevent money from being laundered? I also suspect that I might have missed something in my late-night haze. Reading before bed has its drawbacks . . . There are also moments, reading Gibson, that I wish he'd stop writing fiction and start writing articles on culture and politics. Lots of interesting stuff going on in this book.
    • 3/5
      3.5 stars. Confusingly good.
    • 2/5
      The uncertainty of things keep my attention for the first, perhaps, half of the novel, because I expected it all to come together in a brilliant and confounding climax. That's the point of the thriller, isn't it? Sadly, we don't get that here. The plot falls apart and offers little, if any, satisfaction as it culminates in little more than a multimillion dollar prank.

      We don't read people like Gibson for the flair of his sentences or his profound insight into the human soul. We read them for the thrill, the excitement, to watch as a plot more complicated than we could ever imagine unfold. In the end here though, Gibson's plot fails to fulfill that promise.
    • 5/5
      A very enjoyable book. The ruminations of the junkie character are often amusing. The reference to Morrissey is funny and the technological and cultural descriptions are pleasant. Bigend's comments about society are amusing.There is almost no nature in any Gibson novel, the world is composed only of people and the trends that they embrace or that embrace them.
    • 5/5
      It was hard to get into but it grows. It is a timely piece about governments and private contract black ops. Mostly it is a story about three people in this modern world.
    • 3/5
      "Spook Country" is only the second Willaim Gibson novel that I've read, and I didn't quite find it to be world-changer that "Neuromancer" was. It's an odd, fractured narrative revolving around a McGuffin that pulls in a Cuban-trained network of spies, a government agent working solo, a media billionaire, a talented programer who dabbles in GPS-assisted virtual-reality art, and a former alternative rock figure attempting to break into journalism. Gibson's tone here is more literary and less dense than it was in "Neuromancer," but he's still kept his paranoid edge, and the book seems to be more about mood than anything else. In a series of brief scenes, some of which are boring, others of which are effectively unsettling, these characters interact in various ways in a series of chic hotels, urban slums, safe houses and city streets. I think Gibson might be reaching to identify some sort of zeitgeist here, which is a noble enough pursuit: he figures it's technologically advanced, transnational, anxious, and secretive. Not a bad guess, probably.
    • 3/5
      The end is significantly better than the beginning. Not my favourite Gibson, but enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      I liked this because I like Gibson's sense of culture and the way that he explores those links between advertising and "product placement" and art and conspiracy and power and...well, I love all that stuff. I found this one hard to get through only because I felt, once again, the lack of character development that often pulls me into a book. Still and all, Gibson has something that will probably lead me right along to reading Zero History.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book; densely layered and ambiguous at first it gradually resolved and came to an unexpectedly sweet conclusion. Not my favorite Gibson (that would be Pattern Recognition) but a nice read.
    • 5/5
      Gibson is a pretty consistently excellent writer - mostly because of his ability to take potentially mundane subjects and write about them in ways that make them seem fascinating, exotic - and "cyber!" Hollis Henry, a woman who is a minor celebrity in certain circles because she used to sing with a gothy indie-rock band, has been asked to write an article for a start-up magazine that aims to be 'the Belgian 'Wired''. on 'locative art' - a new form of digital, virtual reality installation art. However, something doesn't smell right. The magazine doesn't seem to exist. The mogul in charge doesn't really seem to interested in art - but wants information on any mentions of 'international shipping.' Meanwhile, a junkie who can translate Russian is being held captive by a man who may or may not be a private detective, a DEA agent - or a nutcase. And also meanwhile, a young member of a crime family (whose resemblance to Johnny Depp merits multiple mentions), is being instructed on a potentially dangerous mission. Spook Country is not a perfect book. Some elements would gain from a bit more background, to make them more believable. But overalls, it's clever, funny, interesting - and definitely hip.
    • 4/5
      William Gibson is best known for his dark future books such as Neuromancer and that's what I was expecting this book to be. However it is more hopeful than dark and perhaps could be set right now or in the very near future. I think all the technology referred to is available now although perhaps not used as it is in this book.Hollis Henry is a former musician who is now trying to make her living as a writer. She has been hired by a digital magazine (which may or may not exist) to go to LA and do a piece on locative art. What's locative art you ask? Artists make a digital piece of art that can only be viewed with a special helmet in a certain spot. The artists have to team up with a computer wizard who can arrange the GPS tagging and internet serving and so on. The best wizard is a fellow named Bobby Chombo. The owner of the magazine wants Hollis to interview Chombo and it soon becomes apparent that the magazine piece is only a cover for what he really wants to discover. It takes almost the whole book to find out what that is. It also takes almost the whole book to find out what a young Cuban in New York and a government spy teamed up with a drug user also in New York have to do with the story.But it is a fast-paced ride and every step seems quite plausible. I enjoyed it very much and really wanted more. Fortunately it seems Gibson has more. Now I have to find Zero History which is a sequel to Spook Country.
    • 4/5
      On the first read, I was underwhelmed. In this re-read, I can't get enough of the perspective Gibson brings. He is a writer. He has a lot more going on on the page than most others working the craft today.

      This novel is about technology, fashion, and espionage and ends up combining fascinating observations on all three into an insightful view on post 9-11 America.
    • 2/5
      The uncertainty of things keep my attention for the first, perhaps, half of the novel, because I expected it all to come together in a brilliant and confounding climax. That's the point of the thriller, isn't it? Sadly, we don't get that here. The plot falls apart and offers little, if any, satisfaction as it culminates in little more than a multimillion dollar prank.

      We don't read people like Gibson for the flair of his sentences or his profound insight into the human soul. We read them for the thrill, the excitement, to watch as a plot more complicated than we could ever imagine unfold. In the end here though, Gibson's plot fails to fulfill that promise.
    • 3/5
      Not in the sense it's "funny" - but in the sense that in the end not much happens in the book, and while we see some continuity with previous work (through the Blue Ant agency featured in at least a previous book by Gibson), this new "world" does not look (to me) as interesting as the previous cyberpunk works.If you like Gibson style, though, you will probably appreciate it anyway.
    • 2/5
      I have never read anything by this author before and based on this book, I will not seek him out in the future. The technology discussed in it, seems ancient by today's standards yet I think this book was supposed to be a sort of futuristic vision of America. The first 50 pages the limit I usually give to a book, do nothing to draw you in to the story, the storyline is not fleshed out at all, there is no symmetry to how or why anything described will later be relevant or useful and I did not connect with any of the characters. This book definitely did not work for me.
    • 4/5
      Ugh, heap good paper.
    • 1/5
      I don't know if it's me, but I could barely get through a chapter of this. And the chapters are, like, a page long each. Look, I loved Neuromancer as much as the next guy (when it came out-it doesn't hold up), and I even would say Pattern Recognition was gripping, but Spook Country is a mess.
    • 4/5
      So, what did I like about the latest William Gibson novel? His take on Los Angeles; the use of Vancouver, B.C., where Gibson lives, and New York City, where I grew up, as settings for a lot of the action; the plausibility of his scenario; the inventiveness of his plot and context; and the very satisfying conclusion. Not to mention that this novel can be read as a very pointed comment on some aspects of the Iraq venture.
    • 4/5
      I got a review copy--it's a kinda-sorta sequel to Pattern Recognition. It was awesome.
    • 4/5
      Impressive and very atmospheric. Good scifi - a bit political, but still fits into this world very well.
    • 3/5
      I love William Gibson. However, I did not love this book. If you haven't read any other William Gibson novels, stay the hell away from this one. Go read Neuromancer, or Pattern
      Recognition. Those are shining examples of what Gibson is capable of. Spook Country is not.

      Spook country takes three different story lines and works them separately.

      You've seen this form before. You know that they are going to somehow influence each other, or come crashing together at
      some point.

      That's not a new literary device by any stretch. And if an author is going to take it on, it needs to be tight, it needs to be a convergence that the reader cares about, and preferably there is some new twist that hasn't been done before. Gibson does none of these things.

      When the three stories do finally converge, it feels more like that magical tangle of knots that even carefully coiled electrical cords devolve into over time. It isn't that tight braid where each thread is essential that i would have expected from Gibson.

      I should reiterate. I love William Gibson.
      And there are moments in this book where his nearly prophetic imagination shines through.

      Gibson has a knack for coming up with these "ideas". They are more than the usual science fiction "what if"s. They are closer to near future foretelling.

      If you read Neuromancer for example, you'll find his
      passages about Cyberspace to be a pretty accurate description of where we are now, and where we're heading in the near future. And then you'll check the published date and see that it was written in 1984. A time when the internet was just starting to be available on campuses and still being called "gopher"

      Spook country has a mysterious shipping container that has never been allowed dock. It changes ships and essentially lives at sea. It's contents and owners are unknown, it is
      an orphan, neither being owned, nor recognized by any country or it's laws.

      There is the new artform that combines GPS coordinates with a specific internet address. So that you can only see that piece of art if you are both at the correct coordinates,
      and have the correct web address. An evolution of geo-caching almost.

      And one of my favorites was the concept of training called the Systema.

      Gibson explains it just enough to make it work in the book, but leaves the details of the Guerreros a mystery.

      "The uncles who taught him systema had themselves been taught by a Vietnamese, a former soldier, one who had come from Paris to end his days in the village of Las Tunas. Tito as a child had sometimes seen this man at rural family functions, but never in Havana, and had nevr spoken with him. The Vietnamese had always worn a loose black cotton shirt with no collar, untucked at the waist, and brown plastic shower sandals scuffed the color of dust in a village street. Tito had seen him, as the older men had sat drinking beer and smoking cigars, ascend a two-story wall of whitewashed concrete blocks, no more purchase afforded than the very shallow grooves of mortar between the courses of blocks. It was a strange memory, since even as a child Tito had taken what he saw to be impossible, in the ordinary sense of the world. No applause from the watching uncles, no sound at all, the blue smoke rising as they puffed their cigars. And the Vietnamese rising like that smoke in the twilight, and as quickly, his limbs not so much moving as insinuating themselves into different and constantly changing relationships with the wall. "

      "And while he had learned the uncles’ ways, Juana had taught him the ways of the Guerreros: Eleggua,Ogún, Oshosi and Osun. As Eleggua opens every road, so Ogún clears each road with his machete. God of iron and wars, of labor; owner of every technology. The number seven, colors green and black, and Tito held these inwardly now, as he walked toward Prince Street..."

      Like I said, if you haven't read other William Gibson novels, stay the hell away.

      If you have read William Gibsons other works... who are we kidding? You're going to buy this no matter what i say. But I would recommend picking up a used paperback copy.
    • 3/5
      A good read, Gibson has its own style, cryptic at times, condensed in others and more expansive in others still. The story is gripping enough however I found the end a bit anticlimactic.
      It was my first time reading Gibson, and I expected more..
    • 3/5
      A curious story with a lot of high tech gadgetry and three separate sets of characters that at first don't seem to be related but in the end all intersect.

      I'm not sure what exactly the story is about in the end. In fact it ends rather quietly imprecise.

      One thing about Gibson's writing: He uses more commas than any other writer I've ever written. Makes for 'jerky' reading - annoying but not deadly.
    • 4/5
      A former rock star turned journalist is researching a story on locative art—GPS-enabled overlays that can change the way a place looks for those with the right equipment—and finds that she might just be doing more than that, somehow intervening in a secret world of spycraft and subterfuge. There’s some physical danger, especially for one of the POV spy-types, but not a lot, and the macguffins aren’t really the point. Maybe the story we get about the target is right, but Gibson really seems to be writing about transience and the inability of one person ever to know what exactly is going on around him/her. I enjoyed it, but it’s not clear that there’s much there there.
    • 4/5
      The minimalist style and understated wit of the writing is what pulls you in. The book is not science fiction but part of the plot revolves around an interesting form of art based on spacial technology -- locative art. It is viewed via location-aware helmets that obtain coordinates from GPS. The art is projected on the visual field when helmet is at a precise geo location. In character the art could be abstract or could, for example, recreate a famous scene that took place at that precise place.The book tells three disconnected stories in parallel.Hollis Henry is a former punk-band musician who attempts to break into art reporting. The investigation of locative art is her first foray into journalism. She is hired by a magazine that doesn't yet exist, this is used as a ploy by its owner to engage her in finding some answers he needs. The database that hosts the locative art is also a place where secrets of interest are hidden.Tito comes from a Cuban crime family, he speaks Russian, lives his life within the confines of KGB's rule-book, and relies on a fighting technique based on Latin American religious trance. He is hired for an operation of information smuggling where data is passed on the hard drive of an iPod.Milgrim, an addict who is held on a leash by a mysterious intelligence agent called Brown, is required to translate anything intercepted from Tito.The story converges on one central object, a shipping container sought by people in the three different story lines. This objective is vague during most of the book, a subtle sense of disconnect comes out of the pages. It is a masterful way to instill some mild paranoia; and to keep you interested until the end. I liked it very much.
    • 4/5
      After having invented cyberspace, or coined the term, [author: William Gibson] now gets all geographical on us. He goes geo-locative. He returns to space: "Someone told me that cyberspace was 'everting'. That's how she put it.""Sure. And once it everts,there isn't any cyberspace is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of lokking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we're here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here." He pushed his hair aside and let both blue eyes drill into her.
    • 4/5
      William Gibson has stopped writing science fiction.That's not to say that his style or content has changed. Rather, it shows that our world has now caught up to his vision. I thought that when I read his previous book. 'Pattern recognition'; now, with 'Spook country', it becomes all the plainer. There is a feature in the novel that we don't have in our world (as far as I know); I'm not aware of locative art, virtual sculptures located in the real world that you need to be online at their presumed location to see, but with smartphones and iPads, that can only be just around the corner.My early impression of this book was "So far, so Gibson", and others have commented that he writes the same book over and over. I soon began to move away from this view. 'Spook country' is set in a very specific political territory: the human landscape of those who the end of the Cold War left beached, without a direction or a purpose. One of his characters is a teenager of a Chinese-Cuban expatriate family, whose "family firm" turns out to have been the KGB, but who have been deserted in the political upheavals of the end of the 20th century when allegiances and political viewpoints changed almost overnight.Given that the plot quickly begins to involve people for whom sudden death is part of their daily grind, this novel quickly acquired, for me, a clearer focus than previous Gibson offerings. Perhaps this is why others have compared it more to 'Neuromancer' than some of his later intervening works. Certainly, I found it becoming a page-turner as I got closer to the end; I was getting quite excited by the outcome!The characters, though typically Gibson, are also an interesting bunch. Milgrim, for example; addicted to anti-anxiety drugs, he is held hostage by the one-time (or wannabe?) US agent Brown for his translation skills; does his name, though, possibly reference the originator of the Milgram experiment, the one that showed that ordinary people can turn into sadistic monsters if ordered to do a nasty thing by a sufficiently powerful authority figure? And once more we meet Hubertus Bigend, a character whose name is probably the only deliberate joke that Gibson has ever given us, and a character looking increasingly shady - there now appears to be more to Bigend's agency, Blue Ant, than we previously thought, with its penchant for concealed offices with power-operated drive-in garages, beloved of 1960s spy thrillers, its global reach, and Bigend's sudden intertest in potentially dangerous people and acts. Given that in my mind's eye, Bigend has always been played by John Malkovich, perhaps I'm making him more sinsister than I ought - or am I?So: a book which turned out to be more interesting than I expected; or is it just that Gibson is turning into the sort of cultural phenomomen that his characters obsess over?