Like Pattern Recognition before it, William Gibson's eighth novel, Spook Country, feels like dictation from the zeitgeist. Its "illegal facilitators," nonexistent magazines, terrorists, pirates, junkies, mad art dealers, and WMD are all woven together into something more unsettling and blackly comic than anything he's done before. Gibson and I started talking in '04, shortly before meeting in person while I was in Vancouver working on a doomed TV pilot based on my comic book series Global Frequency. At the time, he disclosed that near-future events would determine whether Spook Country would be comedy or horror. We've stayed in touch electronically ever since, and when wired asked me to talk to him about the book, set for release in August, we picked up right where we left off.

Gibson: Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page.