Q&A: William Gibson Discusses Spook Country and Interactive Fiction
Topic: Arts
7:22 pm EDT, Jul 26, 2007
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.
If you only watch one YouTube movie today featuring dancing country farmer's daughters contortionists singing about potato salad, it should be this one.
Starts a little slow, then all hell breaks loose around 1:15, combining Hee Haw with Cirque.
If Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey met Michael Bay's 1988 blowout blockbuster Armageddon, it might resemble Sunshine, a new beautifully crafted sci-fi adventure that's as thought-provoking as it is thrilling. Created by the British filmmaking team of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland (who made the smart zombie flick 28 Days Later), Sunshine imagines a near future when the sun is dying and a solar winter has enveloped the earth. To save humanity, an international crew aboard the aptly named Icarus II sets out towards the center of the solar system to deliver a nuclear device to re-ignite the sun.
Heavy metal was born in the West Midlands, and has developed a global following matched only in hip-hop. It's time to stop sneering and celebrate this proud cultural heritage.
The Body as Dream series is based on the certainty that our reality exists because we’ve given it a name, that our representation of the world is as important as its existence a priori and that we, along with the world we’re a part of, are defined by our words.
The writing is a continual repetition of words which form an entirety of illegible signs that envelop the skin, cover and replace it. Light or ponderous, winking or solemn, all of these images represent the same curious astonishment at what we are.
In contrast to The New Yorker, The Washington Post seems to like Spook Country.
Like its predecessor, Spook Country depicts a world transformed by globalization, by the threat -- and memory -- of terrorist attacks, and by the presence of proliferating technologies. But though they are set in what is recognizably the same world, these are distinctly different books. ... Spook Country ... takes an unsparing look at a country awash in confusion, fear and pervasive paranoia, a country torn apart by an endless, unpopular war in Iraq.
Despite a full complement of thieves, pushers and pirates, Spook Country is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best work of Don DeLillo. Although he is a very different sort of writer, Gibson, like DeLillo, writes fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture. Spook Country -- which is a beautifully multi-leveled title -- takes an unflinching look at that culture. With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, "grown-ups still ran things."
In Spook Country, Gibson takes another large step forward and reaffirms his position as one of the most astute and entertaining commentators on our astonishing, chaotic present·
Third View revisits the sites of historic western American landscape photographs. The project makes new photographs, keeps a field diary of its travels, and collects materials useful in interpreting the scenes, change and the passage of time.
Recommended for those who liked The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, which I mentioned a few months ago (though it seems longer, somehow).
This compilation introduced Mahlathini to the rest of the world. Primal, growling mbaqanga (with backing vocals by the Mahotella Queens), it prompted many critics to call Mahlathini the "Howlin' Wolf of South Africa."
New usages don't wait for vacancies in the vocabulary; they just show up at work and make themselves useful. When one succeeds, we're good at explaining it after the fact: We needed just that word, with just that nuance, we say, whether it's Shakespeare's puke or the 300-year-old bye-bye or today's dumbing down.
Words that fail, on the other hand, are soon forgotten, like disadorn and aspectable. Were they superfluous, or just unlucky?
