The pre-publication blurbs and extracts published on William Gibson's blog mentioned Node magazine , a fictional magazine described in Spook Country, which is a vehicle for one of the main protagonists Hubertus Bigend to allow him to get Hollis Henry and others to ask journalistic questions to try to track down Bobby Chombo and the mysterious shipping container. Actual publication of Node or even publicity and marketing "buzz" before launc, seems to be deliberately discouraged.
However, this Node magazine does actually have a presence on the internet, Node Magazine blog courtesy of patternboy, who is also publishing daily chapter summaries and quotations until the official US publication date (tomorrow). These are illustrated and expanded with images and hyperlinks from other web resources, giving life to some otherwise arcane knowledge or obscure brand names.
I sometimes add a bit more commentary from my own web researches and pre-existing knowledge and experience, on these selections - see this blog's node.tumblr.com.
What is interesting is that William Gibson mentions this in two recent interviews:
Santa Cruz Sentinel.com interview:
August 5, 2007 Chris Watson, Bookends: William Gibson explores the science fiction of the here-and-now in his new novel[...]
"Someone's already named a Web site after NODE, the nonexistent magazine in 'Spook Country,' " he said. "It's sort of scary"
[...]
Page 2 of the Silicon.com interview
Q&A: William Gibson, science fiction novelistHeading into Spook Country with the cyberspace guru
By Steve Ranger
Published: Monday 6 August 2007[…]
How has technology changed writing?
The thing that has affected me most directly during Pattern Recognition, and subsequently, is the really strange new sense I have of the Google-ability of the text. It’s as though there is a sort of invisible hyperlink theoretical text that extends out of the narrative of my novel in every direction.
Someone has a website going where every single thing mentioned in Spook Country has a blog entry and usually an illustration so, every reference, someone has taken it, researched it and written a sort of little Wikipedia entry for it and all in the format of a website that pretends to be from a magazine called Node, which is an imaginary magazine, within Spook Country, and which turns out to be imaginary in the context of the narrative.
I have this sense when I write now that the text doesn’t stop at the end of the page and I suppose I could create web pages somewhere and lead people to them through the text which is an interesting concept. I actually played with doing that in Spook Country but I didn’t know enough about it. Everything is bending towards hypertext now.