I’m in the air, wheeling into San Francisco, having just finished William Gibson’s Spook Country. I brought it with me on a trip to Canada, because you should read later Gibson on airplanes and in slightly-foreign Western hotels, just as you should read Ballard in airports and light industrial parks, and William Burroughs off your face on purest horse.
I like Gibson in exactly the way you thought I would, so I’m not sure I can say anything unpredictable here. The potted-review I came up with when I was about twenty pages will do: This feels like Eighties Gibson, writing about our recent past as his envisaged near future. Set in 2006, it has geohacking, retro-fame, rogue states, cold war warriors gone white hot with rage: they’re all written about as though extrapolated from 1985, instead of marked back from 2007. I feels like a 20th century dystopia, which sadly doubles up as rather optimistic from our point of view.
There, gnomic enough for you? I’m trying to be awkward. I was mildly irritated all the way through by a spoiler I’d read in a review — which turned out not to be a spoiler at all, but an inept phrasing by the critic. No-spoilers are even worse than spoilers, because you don’t even have that grim sensation of following through. You just read to the end of the book, and then go “Hey, wait, wasn’t it supposed to turn out they were all otters all along?”
I’m still having dreams — which may, now I think about it, due to my steadily worsening stomach (it may be horrendously nasty gut-rot, but I doubt it: I think it’s just IBS turned psychosomatically psychopathic. I’m seeing a gastro in a fortnight. I’m sure he’ll just recommend a change of diet. Gastro! The menu!).
Last night I dreamt I was in a jeep in South America with Cory, planting explosives to covertly excavate out a new, spare, Panama canal for the US. The day before I was a sort of inept Professor Xavier, doing childcare for a bunch of superpowered preschoolers and having to defend them from some bigger supercriminal kids. Lots of soccer-coach encouragement of them to shoot percussive sonic blasts while I cowered behind them. This is a parental anxiety dream, but more exciting than most.
I was in Canada to meet with privacy activists. I can’t give you their names because obviously we all met in darkened rooms wearing blindfolds. I did get to see Michael Chertoff give a keynote though. Boy did he misread the audience. Never ever tell an international conference of data protection and privacy commissioners that you can scan a fingerprint at the US border, and match it to a print on a document found in a safe house in Europe. Because while you’re sitting there thinking “hooray for l33t national security tricks!”, they’re thinking: what the hell else are you doing with that tech?
I guess we’re all in a fucking jeep driven by a science fiction author now.