Spook Country - 000.nfo
General Information
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Title: Spook Country
Author: William Gibson
Read By: Robertson Dean
Copyright: 2007
Audiobook Copyright: 2007
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Books On Tape
Abridged: No
Original Media Information
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Source: 9 cd
Condition: Very Good
File Information
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Number of MP3s: 110
Total Duration: 11:02:07
Total MP3 Size: 456.15
Parity Archive: No
Ripped By: Nobby
Ripped With: easy cd-da extractor pro
Encoded At: CBR 96 kbit/s 44100 Hz Mono
ID3 Tags: Set, v1.1, v2.3
Posting
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Posting Plan: tag for ipod,
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Book Description
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Amazon.com
Now that the present has caught up with William Gibson's vision of the
future, which made him the most influential science fiction writer of
the past quarter century, he has started writing about a time--our time--in
which everyday life feels like science fiction. With his previous novel,
Pattern Recognition, the challenge of writing about the present-day
world drove him to create perhaps his best novel yet, and in Spook Country
he remains at the top of his game. It's a stripped-down thriller that
reads like the best DeLillo (or the best Gibson), with the lives of
a half-dozen evocative characters connected by a tightly converging
plot and by the general senses of unease and wonder in our networked,
post-9/11 time.
Across the Border to Spook Country
For the last few decades, William Gibson, who grew up in Virginia and
elsewhere in the United States, has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia,
just across the border from Amazon.com's Seattle headquarters, which
made for a short drive for a lunchtime interview before the release
of Spook Country. We met just a few miles from where the storylines
of the new novel, in a rare scene set in Gibson's own city, converge.
You can read the full transcript of the interview, in which we discussed,
among other things, writing in the age of Google, visiting the Second
Life virtual world, the possibilities of science fiction in an age of
rapid change, and his original proposal for Spook Country, which we
have available for viewing on our site. Here are a few excerpts from
the interview:
Amazon.com: Could you start by telling us a little bit about the scenario
of the new book?
William Gibson: It's a book in which shadowy and mysterious characters
are using New York's smallest crime family, a sort of boutique operation
of smugglers and so-called illegal facilitators, to get something into
North America. And you have to hang around to the end of the book to
find out what they're doing. So I guess it's a caper novel in that regard.
Amazon.com: The line on your last book, Pattern Recognition was that
the present had caught up with William Gibson's future. So many of the
things you imagined have come true that in a way it seems like we're
all living in science fiction now. Is that the way you felt when you
came to write that book, that the real world had caught up with your
ideas?
Gibson: Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive
it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science
fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to
absolutely be the case. If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary
future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate
sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond
that. And I think over the course of these last two books--I don't think
I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know
if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make
up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s--as strange
as it may seem to say this--we had such luxury of stability. Things
weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things
are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition
says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very
elaborate future.
Amazon.com: Now that you're writing about the present, do you consider
yourself a science fiction writer these days? Because the marketplace
still does.
Gibson: I never really believed in the separation. But science fiction
is definitely where I'm from. Science fiction is my native literary
culture. It's what I started reading, and I think the thing that actually
makes me a bit different than some of the science fiction writers I've
met who are my own age is that I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and
William Burroughs in the same week. And I started reading Beat poets
a year later, and got that in the mix. That really changed the direction.
But it seems like such an old-fashioned way of looking at things. And
it's better not to be pinned down. It's a matter of where you're allowed
to park. If you can park in the science fiction bookstore, that's good.
If you can park in the other bookstore, that's really good. If people
come and buy it at Amazon, that's really good.
I'm sure I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing
of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails. But
that just the way it is. All of that stuff reads so differently now.
I think nothing dates more quickly than science fiction. Nothing dates
more quickly than an imaginary future. It's acquiring a patina of quaintness
even before you've got it in the envelope to send to the publisher.
Amazon.com: So do you think that's your own career path, that you're
less interested in imagining a future, or do you think that the world
is changing?
Gibson: I think it's actually both. Until fairly recently, I had assumed
that it was me, me being drawn to use this toolkit I'd acquired when
I was a teenager, and using my old SF toolkit in some kind of attempt
at naturalism, 21st-century naturalistic fiction. But over the last
five to six years it's started to seem to me that there's something
else going on as well, that maybe we're in what the characters in my
novel Idoru call a "nodal point," or a series of them. We're in a place
where things could just go anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I happened
to read Charlie Stross's argument as to why he believes that there will
never, ever be any manned space travel. It's not going to happen. We're
not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it's
so convincing. I read that and I'm like, "My god, there goes so much
of the fiction I read as a child."
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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
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. (Aug.)-
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