Warning: getimagesize(images/jpgs/2007/11/21/reader-spookcountry.jpg) [function.getimagesize]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/flagpole/flagpole.com/inc/fp_Article.php on line 67

Warning: getimagesize(images/jpgs/2007/11/21/reader-wheresmyjetpack.jpg) [function.getimagesize]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/flagpole/flagpole.com/inc/fp_Article.php on line 67

One day in 1986, a friend of mine, an aspiring science fiction writer, found himself sharing an elevator with William Gibson. For SF fans, this is like meeting Keith Richards, as Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer had just broken out big and Gibson was officially The Next Big Thing with his visionary, übercool tale of rogue hackers and street samurai fighting shadow wars on the information frontier. The term “cyberspace” came from that book, as did the Cyberpunk SF movement, whose influence on the world at large is still being felt, not only in pop culture - you now know who to thank and/or blame for The Matrix and its imitators - but in the course of our info-driven global marketplace. After a few moments of polite conversation, Gibson invited my friend to a party and my friend said, “no.” Upon hearing this, the rest of us beat him severely about the head and shoulders. Dammit, when William freaking Gibson invites you into his world, you say “yes!”

Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country (Penguin Putnam Trade, 2007), is an open door with a welcome mat. Readers who may have been intimidated or put off in the past by Gibson’s frenetic pacing and relentless techno-fetishism and culture-jamming would do well to take a look at him these days. A couple of years ago, the author turned a corner with 2004’s Pattern Recognition, a slower-paced novel with thoughtful characterizations, set in the present day, and Spook Country continues this trend (the two novels share a character, a cryptic Zen billionaire with an unknown agenda). Though no less hip than his earlier novels set in the grungy future, Gibson’s new books explore a world that’s finally caught up with him.

Spook Country follows three characters on their way to an inevitable collision: Hollis Henry, a former cult rock singer, now a struggling journalist working on a piece about virtual-reality artists who create location-oriented tableaux by mashing VR and GPS (you can stand in front of The Viper Room and watch River Phoenix dying on the sidewalk); Milgrim, a junkie Russian-language translator held prisoner by a rogue black-bag agent; and Tito, a runner for a Cuban crime family, who channels the orishas, the spirits of open doors and wildcat fortunes. These three disparate characters all find themselves in hot pursuit of a steel shipping container with a mysterious, sinister cargo that’s been circling the globe for years. Along the way, they encounter hackers, code-monkeys, spies, modern pirates, musicians and assassins, none of whom seem out of place in the technological fringe-world that is Gibson’s playground.

The novel works as an espionage thriller, as a meditation on the future of art as a fusion of the aesthetic with the technical and as sheer gadget-porn. (I wish I was a cryptic Zen billionaire who could afford the geek toys these people get to play with.) The book is at its best when it shows us just how integrated we have become with our technology, how the dreams of science fiction have become our absurdly commonplace reality.

Let’s face it, the iPhone is more advanced than half the gear on Star Trek. Housewives walk around with Bluetooth receivers grafted into their ears like cyborgs. Schoolchildren speak in programming code. The cyberpunk novel has become simply the novel, and Spook Country is less a science-fiction vision than a flashlight into dark corners that are already here.

When William Gibson invites you into his world, you say “yes.” Chances are, you already have.

Unisex Jumpsuits: William Gibson has always been eerily prophetic in his work, but other SF predictions continue to elude us. It’s 2007, and, according to the futurists of the last century, we should be living, working and golfing on Mars by now, commuting in flying cars and enjoying seven-course meals in handy pill form while we watch holographic sitcoms. What the hell? How could we have failed to fulfill our Buck Rogers destiny so completely? Screw advances in medicine, communications and the practical sciences - where are the great leaps in personal coolness?

Roboticist Daniel H. Wilson, author of the very funny How to Survive a Robot Uprising, attempts to bring us all up to speed with Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived (St. Martin’s Press, 2007), a progress report on all of the nifty advances promised us but as yet undelivered. Wilson gives us the science in easily digested bites and snarky asides. Teleportation? It’s being done but only with photons. Underwater hotels? Currently being attempted but only barely beyond wading depth. Unisex jumpsuits? Not a problem, only who in their right mind wants those anyway?

Cool Gear: While we’re waiting for our personal hovercraft, however, we’ll have to make do with the tech that we have right now, and we’re not exactly hurting. This year’s rash of consumer buying guides is coming in just ahead of the holiday shopping season, chockfull of bright, shiny objects for all the magpies out there hungry for personal hardware. Consumer Reports’ Electronics Buying Guide is, as usual, the most reliable resource for comparison shopping, but Wired magazine’s special issue Test is the most fun to read, as is to be expected from a magazine staffed wholly by gadget-wonks. Test features exhaustive head-to-heads between competing cell phones (broken down into subcategories by function and size), desktops, laptops, cameras and camcorders, TVs and MP3 players, download providers and VoIP companies, with the requisite mix of geek knowhow and irreverence. Good news if you had the prescience years ago to buy and hold onto Apple stock: Steve Jobs continues to dominate the personal-tech market in several categories, with the iPhone holding onto its coolest-toy-ever status, bugs and all. While the guide deals primarily with those goodies that people wear to look Very Important, it also touches upon a few other hardware categories, and now I know what to get to vacuum my post-millennial floors and brew my post-millennial coffee. Now if I can only figure out how to inflate my post-millennial paycheck…

---

You Get What You Pay For: And while none of us has everything we want, what we do have right now is the Internet. Lots and lots of Internet. I’m on it as I write. Half of you are using it to read this. We all have to pry our kids off it with a crowbar. And as the Hollywood writers’ strike plunges television deeper into the hell of reruns and reality shows, we’ll be spending a lot more time on it. Just try to remember as you’re surfing to stay away from the network and movie studio sites. The current dispute between the writers and producers has to do with Internet revenue, the money being made from Internet advertising on sites offering rebroadcast content.

We can watch full reruns of “My Name is Earl” or clips from “The Colbert Report” on our computers, but under the current system, none of the subsequent ad revenue is going to writers - you know, the people who conceived this material in the first place. For their part, the producers claim that they’re not making enough on web content to share it with the writers, but this is as categorically bogus as any Major League Baseball team owner pleading poverty when demanding a player salary cap. It’s simple, really. Pay writers fairly for their words, and you get good words. Don’t, and you get "Cops."

John G. Nettles