William Gibson - Spook Country (Putnam, 2007)
William Gibson has long been one of my favorite authors. Certainly I find him a talented writer, but my favorite aspect of his work is his futurism - his thought on how different technologies affect our social world. He is best known for Neuromancer (1984), a book that saw the first use of the word "cyberspace" and envisioned the Internet six years before the net was released to the general public.
Something of a sequel to Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country weaves three independent stories together - one of a journalist investigating digital art, one of a Chinese-Cuban racketeer who transfers stolen government secrets stored on the hard drives of iPods, and one of a U.S. Intelligence agent tracking the stolen data to find out who is taking it and what it is being used for. These parallel plots are woven together for an original, unexpected conclusion.
While I must say that I find it a bit less engaging than previous Gibson novels, Spook Country is still a fast paced, enjoyable read with a slick post-modern style. Its 84 chapters rarely take more than five or six pages apiece, thus making the book feel like it is constantly being updated - almost like reading a string of blog posts. And while the book touches upon different subjects affecting our contemporary globalized world, the topic I found most interesting was Gibson's commentary on the loss of privacy that comes with being wired digitally. For example, consider this interaction between the journalist and a character (ridiculously) named Hubertus Bigend:
Her phone rang in her purse. It was still attached to the scrambler. How would that work if it were anyone other than Bigend? She answered. "Hello?"
"Just checking," said Bigend, and suddenly she didn't want to tell him about Sarah.
A reaction to her sense of his ubiquity, if not yet actual then potential. Once he was established in your life, he'd be there, in some way no ordinary person, no ordinary boss, eve, could be. Once she accepted him, past a certain point, there was always going to be the possibility of him ringing up to say "Just checking," before she could even ask who was calling. Did she want that? Could she afford not to?
While the idea that someone could just be in contact at any time for whatever reason is hardly comforting, Gibson is alluding to a real phenomenon that can occur when someone bases a part of his or her life on a digital network. For some this loss of privacy is worth it. Putting details of one's life on a social network, for example, necessarily sacrifices some privacy, but many people are willing to accept that loss in order to connect to their friends. The extent to which people are willing to sacrifice privacy in a networked environment thus becomes an open question - a question that has served as the topic of such books as Privacy at Risk and World Without Secrets.
Because it is a well crafted, enjoyable read, and because it poses contemporary topics such as digital privacy to its reader, I recommend Spook Country for anyone interested in a novel that reflects real-world issues.
Contributed by Aaron Bowen