Spook Country
Ratings57
Average rating3.7
The “cool and scary”(San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer. • spook (spo͞ok) n.: A specter; a ghost. Slang for “intelligence agent.” • country (ˈkən-trē) n.: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. • spook country (spo͞ok ˈkən-trē) n.: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place we are learning to live. Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him... “A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.”—The Washington Post Book World
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3 primary booksBlue Ant
Blue Ant is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2003 with contributions by William Gibson.
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Having enjoyed Gibson's previous book, Pattern Recognition, I was looking forward to this one. But sadly this slick, contemporary thriller, told in bite-size chapters, fails to live up to expectations.
The three strands of the book are confusing to begin with, so disparate are they, that you wonder where the story is going. It's only halfway through that the story gets moving and the tales of Tito, the young Cuban who passes iPods to a mysterious old man; Brown, the rogue spy watching Tito with a prescription drug addicted translator in tow; and Hollis Henry, journalist and one time lead singer of cult band The Curfew, finally start converging. Oh and floating in the background is the mysterious Hubertus Bigend of advertising agency Blue Ant, as he was in Pattern Recognition.
But whereas the McGuffin in Pattern Recognition was genuinely intriguing and the pay-off satisfying, here it falls flat and I was just left thinking “is that it?”. Gibson is always well worth reading, but he's written better in the past. I only hope the third book in this loose trilogy, Zero History, is better.
This was a disappointing sequel to Pattern Recognition. I had difficulty engaging with both the plot and the characters.
I liked this book but unlike Pattern Recognition I didn't get sucked into it. The short chapters were interesting but I think it kept me from building the kind of immersion I expect. But a lukewarm experience ina Gibson novel is still hotter than most books.
