Comments on a456: Techno-Novela: William Gibson's Spook Country

so i must be missing something but what happens to...

2008-07-07T18:09:00.000-04:00

so i must be missing something but what happens to the canister of money???

Unless you recognize the "8½" potential in the con...

2007-10-17T03:11:00.000-04:00

Unless you recognize the "8½" potential in the container-full-of-money which is, or becomes, the whole movie by the end of the book, I don't think you can come down on Gibson's ability to do what he set out to do, or even what that was.
Writing a book in which the protagonists and antagonists both are chasing a container-full-of-money has a fairly large slapstick component built right in. Elevating that chase to a get-it/destroy it conflict makes it more operatic but doesn't lose the light farce entirely.
Not that I thought Gibson's intent was comedy at all, but he's a complicated guy.
What's missing from Spook Country is that flow of magazine-ready techno-porn and gritty near-future hyper-realist texture that's, let's be honest, what makes a lot of his writing addictive. I miss it too.
But Gibson once described himself as more of a poet than a novelist. Maybe the poem isn't as clear as it seems at first reading.

I was also disappointed in Spook Country. My resp...

2007-09-07T10:53:00.000-04:00

I was also disappointed in Spook Country. My response was less eloquent than yours, I just thought about getting old and what happens when one has been on a very nice cutting edge and then just becomes stale. Is this what happened to Cyberpunk? You're right that the book felt rather juvenile and the characters were a tad flat, more like fantasies of themselves than characters. I am not sure how fascinating locative media are, I can tell I am getting old when I am more concerned about the potential use of gps on my cell to totally inundate my life with targeted advertisements rather than any liberating artistic expression.

I didn't really understand his choice to emphasize the government in this book either, because, wasn't the government ultimately the bad guys? Wasn't the container being moved around by some Cheney-like character? That just seemed odd to me.

So, what would we have Gibson write? Or, if his time has passed, Gibson 2.0. Something more to do with the increasing stratification between the global rich and the global poor? The jet-setting dubai to houston haliburton types compared with those who can't afford to flee new orleans or darfur even in an emergency situation? Or perhaps, the tale of a google-like company who starts out as the anti-microsoft and ends up as the king of surveillance? You could call it, The Voluntary Prisoners of Facebook? I mean, I know that's dark, but the darkness of cyberpunk was a large part of its appeal, no? Or am I just old to be asking such questions?

Well, got to go camping now. But I look forward to chatting with you in the future! Hope your transition to Pton is going / goes well.

I was a little bored by SC, but I loved PR

2007-09-03T22:10:00.000-04:00

I was a little bored by SC, but I loved PR