Author William Gibson
William Gibson delves deep into Spook Country
Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean a cargo ship makes its way inevitably to port. On board is a nondescript container periodically emitting a covert radio signal to its owner. Elsewhere Henry Hollis the former lead singer for cult band The Curfew arrives in Los Angeles to interview Alberto Corrales an artist in the emerging field of geohacking for a new magazine Node . Together with computer programmer Bobby Chombo Alberto overlays digital art in GPS-synchronized virtual space allowing viewers standing outside the former Viper Club to re-witness the streetside death of River Phoenix among other images. The geohackers however have a connection to the mysterious container that Hollis’s enigmatic boss Hubertus Bigend wants exploited.
As befitting a novel named after the surveillance industry secrets and the manipulation of information abound in William Gibson’s latest novel Spook Country . Picking up where his last book Pattern Recognition concluded Gibson has been dwelling on the function of secrets.
“If you have secrets you have knowledge that the other guy may not have” Gibson explains. “That’s always an interesting point. There was a man named Sir Francis Walsingham and who was sort of in an odd way the first head of the British secret service back in the Elizabethan days. He was the British Crown’s first spymaster. He invented many of the classic moves that we take for granted in spy novels like the double agent and false information. One of his famous quotes was ‘Knowledge is never too dear.’ I think that’s still true.”
The influence of Walsingham runs throughout Spook Country though at times it seems as if Gibson turns the former’s maxim on its head: information is cheap and plentiful but its meaning is out of reach. One character Milgrim who is addicted to Japanese designer drugs immerses himself in medieval Gnostic heresies an ancient form of knowledge meant to bring enlightenment. Similarly Tito an underworld go-between seeks solace in mystical Cuban orishis . For Hollis meanwhile lying on her bed in the swank Mondrian hotel each fresh influx of information only makes her more and more uncomfortable. As in other Gibson novels the central access revolves around information but whereas previous efforts dealt with the pursuit of intangible virtual data the characters of Spook Country chase after a concrete object that only seems to blur the closer to it they get.
“The early books had a sort of imaginary superstructure that was like a dramatization of the workings of information. It’s one of the things that are so difficult to make films about because how do you visually represent the politics of information? I found it relatively easy to do in prose fiction but in the world as we’ve come to know it (information) isn’t like that. In trying to represent what it is like you necessarily end up with something muddier more indeterminate but still completely information-based. The role of (information) hasn’t changed but we all have access to a great deal more of it. We all have access to more of it than we can ever practically use.”
Fans of Gibson have often looked to his work to catch glimpses of the future and to an extent Spook Country is no different even though it’s firmly rooted in the present. Instead of fantastic technology though Gibson is charting the emergence of the information economy. Characters splash about arcane tidbits of knowledge as if they were fancy jewels. Hubertus Bigend chases after the secret of the container as another businessman might search for a juicy corporate acquisition. Lurking in the background are the eponymous “spooks” of Spook Country intelligence officers of rival government agencies making allegiances with obscure factions of the New York underworld. Meanwhile everyone is trying to keep their very existence a secret including the soon-to-launch magazine that Hollis has been hired to write for.
Gibson too is somewhat coy about his own research and attempts to draw the many disparate elements of Spook Country together. “When I write these things I’m looking for elements that resonate in some way with the narrative so what I wind up with in the final draft is a kind of complicated resonance between these different things. It’s not like I understand it or even know why it resonates but I just function at the level of the resonance. I hope that people will wonder and ask themselves questions about these things. Ideally they would ask themselves questions that I would never think to ask because everyone will complete the arc of the text in their own way. In the same way no two people really read the same book everybody reads their own version.”
In an interview with Amazon.com Gibson admitted to doing a lot of online researching while writing and an increasing number of his fans take pleasure in tracking his cyber-steps through Google in the process of creating Spook Country . “I’d like to think that millions of different people reading this book could complete it in a million different and unique ways that I’m totally unable to imagine as I’m writing it” he says.
“I think that all narratives are to some extent speculative because all narratives are produced by human beings who are fallible. If I could get one thing from the future in 100 years I think what I’d want is history — what (people from that time) thought of us. Not because we’re particularly important but because in knowing history I’d get a sense of what went on in our lives things that probably aren’t going to be revealed for a long time as well as a sense of who they are because of the speculative narrative they made up about us. I don’t think history’s going to get to a point where this is it this is what happened. It doesn’t seem to work that way. The history of Victorian London as we read it as we write is not the same place we read about 50 years ago.
“All fiction is speculative” he adds. “Any author’s version of the world is just his or her version of the world. For me last Wednesday is just as science fictional as 30 years in the future. In some ways last Wednesday is more science fictional because it has more moving parts that need to be nailed down.”
