I have now finished reading my copy of Spook Country by William Gibson, which I purchased "over the counter" at Blackwell's Bookshop in London on Friday 27th July, although the official publication date in the United Kingdom is Thursday 2nd August, and is Tuesday 7th August in the United States of America.
I might attempt to write a "proper" review after these publication dates.
I shall continue making a few comments on the remaining daily chapter summaries and quotations being published by patternboy in his node.tumblr.com project.
Some vague pre-publication comments:
The technology described in Spook Country is all plausible today - some of it has been under continuous development and improvement for a long time. As William Gibson alluded to before, "the future is not equally distributed" or even widely deployed, yet.
I still prefer the US version of the dust jacket cover artwork to that of the UK version - the blue / green / slate grey / black colour scheme does resonate with the text in at least three chapters.
As other reviewers have said, the book is a page turner, and I could hardly wait to read what happens next.
Since I was not expecting the book to magically solve or even enlighten me about the current geo-political malaise of terrorism and war and incompetence and corruption which our Western Governments are handling so badly, I was not surprised that it offers no answers to intractable problems.
The words "Spook Country" are full of multiple meanings
William Gibson has crafted several of his trademark short witty multi-layered phrase descriptions, and even the occasional wry joke. Will they be enough to please the literati ?
There are some minor points which could be made regarding forensic evidence evasion and electronic counter-surveillance and privacy enhancement techniques, which do not detract from the gist of what is, after all a novel for entertainment, rather than a technical step by step training manual for Spooks, Spies, Smugglers or Illegal Facilitators.
William Gibson's recently published interview regarding his use of Google and and of hyperlinking is very important to the way in which he wrote this book, and the way in which people should read it, because that is the way many people like me read and analyse everything, these days.
Spook Country really does benefit from the use of world wide web search engines like Google and obscure articles in the flawed yet still valuable online encyclopaedia Wikipedia to supplement any local knowledge you have about the locations (New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Vancouver etc.) or electronic tracking and surveillance technologies and intelligence agency tradecraft techniques and unfamiliar (in the United Kingdom at least) designer brand labels etc.
The ending seems to be a happy one for most of the characters.
Has anyone had the sense yet to offer William Gibson lots of money for the film rights to what could be an excellent thriller caper movie ?
Overall, I can recommend Spook Country to new readers and to existing fans of William Gibson.
Excellent early review, ME.
I have thought about exploring the multi-meaning Spook angle after the book is published [I already have some notes on this plus some parallels among different characters, virtually all of whom are "facilitators"]. Maybe we can offer duelling interpretations when the time is right.